


in another life, we might know

by andawaywego



Category: Power Rangers (2017)
Genre: F/F, I promise it has a happy ending, Mild Sexual Content, mild to moderate language, sorta angsty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-20
Updated: 2018-04-21
Packaged: 2019-04-05 05:52:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 41,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14037579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andawaywego/pseuds/andawaywego
Summary: "Kimberly looks beautiful in the early summer air, hair whipping around her face as it comes funneling off the side, off the top of Jason’s truck. Trini holds her hand and looks at her and thinks: 'finally something that can be mine.'If you’d like to know: she’s never had the opportunity to think this before. Not in any way that mattered."[otherwise known as: There are lots of things you should probably do when you think you're about to die. It's just, you know...marrying your best friend isn't usually one of them.]





	1. let's do something (tonight before we die)

**Author's Note:**

> yikes. it's been a while. not even sure how many of you are still out there, but i'm hoping enough to make this messy thing worth posting. i started this back in September? maybe? and now it's finally done. it was supposed to be, like, 10k. but...now it's like 40k...
> 
> it's finished, too, and 7 chapters, total. i'll probably post every couple days (just to give myself enough time shamelessly keep editing oops). apologies for any typos. i type too fast.
> 
> hopefully you enjoy.

“ _Sometimes, she did not know what she feared, what she desired: whether she feared or desired what had been or what would be, and precisely what she desired, she did not know._ ”

\- Leo Tolstoy - ‘Anna Karenina’

..

The air is already hot and Kimberly is holding her hand. Her fingers are clasped so tightly around Trini’s wrist that she can feel the pressure through her armor, present and clinging. When she looks at her, Kimberly’s eyes are hidden, her face there, of course, somewhere behind the opaque blackness of her visor.

Up ahead, Jason is standing seriously, looking around at the forest surrounding them, trying to pinpoint where the tremor is coming from. Zack is beside him, not grinning, not joking. Just frowning seriously. Billy has his fingers up, pressed to the sides of his helmet and she can imagine his eyes closed where she can’t see them, trying to concentrate.

She can feel it in the heart of her -- aching stronger than it ever has before -- and she knows that it’s somewhere close. Of course, it is. But _what_ is somewhere close?

Kimberly’s hands are shaking. They won’t get anything done just standing here.

To clarify: Trini (not-official-quite-yet) Hart smiles at Kimberly from underneath her own visor, grabs one of her hands in both of her own, because she can, because she has to.

“I love you, you know,” she hears herself saying before she’s quite made the decision to do so.

Kimberly’s visor slides up, revealing her face, her eyes -- her _confusion._ “Trini, what--?”

“I’ll lead the way,” she says next, offering no further explanation. The words must string together in a way that makes sense in Kimberly’s head, though, because she opens her mouth, looking ready to argue. Before she can, though, Trini is pressing their lips together, kissing her quickly, and then pulling away, ducking past the boys and into the trees, following the ache inside of herself.

.

But let’s back up.

.

Something like two weeks before all of that happens, Billy says, “Something big is coming, don’t you guys feel it?” and immediately, four sets of terrified eyes are on him.

Alpha-5 blinks.

“You guys feel it right?” He swallows. “Whatever it is is big.”

“Another monster?”

Zack is the one who asks it, illuminated by the shimmering light of the morphing grid in the center of the room. Jason stands, half-morphed, beside him, as if he’d been about to drop his armor completely and had been too shocked by Billy’s question to finish.

The alien superhero equivalent of tripping with your pants around your ankles.

He coughs a little, more out of shock than of necessity, and the armor drops entirely, fading down his wrists and legs until he’s standing there in the same clothes he’d worn to school.

“I don’t know. I just...the last time I felt this way was when Rita…” Billy pauses, stares at them. “When she woke up.”

A lot of questions or theories should follow, but, instead, silence descends.

Rita had said there would be others. Now seems as good a time as any.

“I just thought it was one of you guys,” Trini argues. That empty feeling, she’d thought, had to be caused by one of her teammates and the weird tether they’ve all got to one another. She’d been certain it couldn’t be her own emotion or anything to do with her.

“How big a monster are we talking?” Kimberly cuts in, looking over at Zordon, who has been suspiciously quiet for far too long. “Rita big?” No one answers. “Bigger?”

It’s been nine months with Zordon ordering them around, “leading” them and mostly just offering commentary and criticism for every little thing. Now, though, he’s completely silent and she’s expecting something grand -- another great explanation about how the Power Rangers have always faced down evil bravely and always come out on the other side (save for the time his _entire team died_ ) or maybe just a pep talk, about how they’ve been preparing for this.

Instead, all they get is:

“There’s no way of knowing how big.”

And, well, yeah.

That sorta sounds like whatever this thing is might kill them instead of the other way around.

.

Here’s what it means:

This could very well be bigger than Rita Repulsa and her giant golden monster-boy. Something bigger than those stupid putties they’ve spent their entire senior year cleaning up in between finals and _not_ applying to colleges.

Something that makes Zordon go dark and cold and way more cryptic than usual. Something they can feel tugging out an emptiness in their chest as it grows.

Something that might not even really be worth fighting.

“Well, that’s just great,” Kimberly says from the side of the room, and Trini crosses her arms over her stomach.

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

.

Here is Kimberly Hart sitting on the edge of a mountain:

She’s an absolute vision — soaking wet in her clothes, tank top beneath her shirt, draping up her neck, strappy and patterned in dark purple sunburst. Her hair curling in the heat, in this edgy style of damp disarray. Her feet dangle from the edge, ready to push off and be done with it, and Trini would paint her if she had only the canvas and the skill, the trust that she would ever be able to translate the enigma of Kimberly Hart, slouched against the sunset, in any sort of valuable way.

This is: the Pink Ranger who defended Angel Grove from Rita Repulsa just nine months ago, who walks through the streets with Trini at night looking for anything out of the ordinary.

Who might die.

If this feeling turns out to be what it implies.

(like it did before)

She says, “Fuck,” and slams the heel of her sneaker into the rocky precipice below.

Trini kicks a rock off the ledge and then sits down beside her. “Same.”

“My luck is really just...the _worst_.”

“ _Our_ luck. We’re probably _all_ going to die. Not just you.”

Kimberly sighs and the sound is amplified, carried and ringing through the air and then silence descends.

(It’s terrible. Trini wants to tell her it’s going to be okay, say, _We’re not going to die, we’ll be fine, we’ll win, we won before_ \-- but she can’t, she can’t because she doesn’t _know_ and they might die because Billy is the most hopeful of them all and if _he_ thinks they don’t have a chance then-- then--

And she hates it, she hates being a Power Ranger because it means wading into the fray again, and she hates being just Kimberly Hart’s friend and never reaching out to grab her hand or touch her, because God forbid she touch her in any way and-- )

.

“Where have you been?”

June Ortiz-Kwan stands in the doorway of the kitchen and her daughter kicks her shoes off thirty feet and a decorative china cabinet away.

The questions are always the same.

“Out,” comes Trini’s voice.

The answers are the same, too.

June grumbles and nearly drops the plate she’s drying in her hands, that she carried through the kitchen and out with her. “Why are your clothes always wet when you come home?”

Here’s what’s not the same:

That tugging deep in her chest that throbs with every breath, small for now, but bigger tomorrow, maybe.

The realization that Trini and her team are not the only ones who will die if they lose. That everyone else will be dying with them if anything gets that crystal. It barrels into her chest like a freight train and nearly knocks her off her feet.

What’s not the same is the way Trini crosses the house in her socks, sliding across the hardwood floors until she reaches her mother, standing on the other side. The way her arms come up around her mother’s neck like she’s a child again, drawing her into a tight embrace with a plate pressed between them.

“Trini, what--?” June begins to say, but she doesn’t finish.

“Love you,” Trini whispers into the shoulder of her mother’s shirt. “I’m sorry.”

In the next ten or so seconds that the hug lasts, June is unsuccessful in trying to get Trini to tell her _why_ she’s sorry, and calling after her daughter as she escapes upstairs with a click of her bedroom door does nothing to help the situation.

.

Diego and Alex, in her bedroom that night, sit with their backs against her headboard and watch Trini as she hunches over her desk. They’re meant to be playing. That’s what they’d asked if they could do when they’d come swinging in ten minutes prior, with the small, crocheted Ranger dolls June constructed for them when they wouldn’t stop whining about not having good toys.

Now their toys have stilled and Trini is writing on a piece of paper. She taps her pen against her chin.

“She got ink on her,” Diego whispers to his brother and his laugh bubbles up inside his chest, shaking as he tries to keep quiet.

“What do you think she’s writing?”

“Homework?”

Alex shakes his head and presses a thumb into the yarn visor of the Red Ranger. “She _never_ does homework.”

Diego shrugs. “Love letter?”

And Alex smirks. “To her _boyfriend_?” he crows, hopping to his feet and bouncing on his heels until he’s close enough to jump on Trini’s back and land soundly on the floor.

“Dude, what the hell?” She pushes him off and swivels in her chair to look at him, at her other brother, kneeling on her bed.

“What’s his name?”

He tries to peer over her shoulder and she pushes him away, frowning. “Who’s name?” she asks and Diego cackles.

“Your _boyfriend_.”

“Is it Zack?”

Trini frowns again and is right on the cusp of yelling, _Fuck, no!_ when he finally gets a good look at it.

“A list?” he asks, sounding bored already. “It’s a stupid list.”

A boring list, too, and it’s enough to send them stumbling out of her room a moment later.

Normally, Trini would slam the door behind them, but tonight she can’t bring herself to do anything close. She watches them disappear down the hall, laughing the whole way, and then she lays down on her bed where they’d just been for a long time afterwards.

.

Her list has nine things written on it:

_\- Graduate high school_

_\- Fix things with my mom_

_\- Teach my brothers how to drive_

_\- Vote_

_\- Get married, I guess_

_\- Buy my own place, if we're doing cliches_

_\- Be that annoying family on the block with all the crazy Christmas lights_

_\- Learn how to juggle (maybe)_

_\- Not fucking die until I'm eighty_

 

 

At the very top, she writes, _Things I Probably Won’t Get to Do Now That I’m Probably Going to Fucking Die_ , and stuffs the paper into her backpack.

.

They might die and Trini still goes to detention the next morning. Her mother shakes her shoulder _hard_ until she wakes up and then it’s all, “Hurry, you’ll be late,” for the next twenty minutes before she’s practically pushed out of the door and onto the front porch.

It’s a nice day. The sun is shining.

In the parking lot of the high school, Trini chucks the apple her mother gave her into a nestle of trees and the birds shut up for a moment before returning to their crazy cacophony of noise.

“Bee in your bonnet?” Zack breathes down her neck once she’s seated in her usual desk. She ignores him, leaning back to push her shoulder into his throat until he grunts and retreats.

Billy is already seated at his desk, which is uncharacteristically bare. His colored pencils aren’t out and the table top is clear, save for his hands, folded neatly on the very top. He doesn’t look at them, but there’s a slump in his shoulders that simply hadn’t been there before.

Trini is sure of it.

Jason is slumped up ahead and she can only see the back of his head. Still, she knows, could she read his face, it would bear the same exhausted look of utter defeat that her own surely does.

Kimberly smacks her gum across the room. When Trini turns to look at her, she’s smirking a little at the noise and then that same smile falls away.

“Attention in detention,” Mr. Bulkovich says at the front and Trini slips that piece of paper from her bag and spends the next three hours doodling around the edges.

.

“What were you working on?” Zack asks, mere seconds after they’re set free. “Homework? You never do homework in detention.”

Trini gathers her things and, for the most part, ignores him. There’s a rush of movement around her as everyone slowly staggers to their feet. She deftly folds the note and slips it into her pocket before stepping around him and towards the door.

“That’s because I finish my homework _before_ I get home,” she says.

Jason nearly bumps into her a moment later and she mumbles a quiet, “Sorry.”

“You up for training today?” he asks, always so one-track minded.

The others are moving closer. Trini can feel Billy at her heels and Kimberly stepping through a group of kids and apologizing.

“Why?” she asks. “No point, right?”

She’s not expecting the way Jason gets slack-jawed, the harsh intake of breath behind her that must come from Billy.

In any case, she pushes around them and makes her way up the steps and out before anyone can stop her.

.

Training or no, she finds herself at the mine. It’s getting hotter every day and she has her finals in two weeks because she’s supposed to be graduating. She’s supposed to be heading away from this place she’s been in. Realistically, though, she’d understood from that first victory that winning, that being a Power Ranger, meant never leaving this city.

Not completely.

Still, some hope is better than none. Some semblance of life is better than death and now it feels like she has nothing left to look forward to.

The rocks are hard under the seat of her jeans. She shifts, once seated, and tries to get comfortable.

Basically, she has ten seconds before Kimberly says, “Pissy mood, huh?” from behind her.

Trini freezes, shoulders hiked up in fear that settles down the moment Kimberly comes up behind her, shuffling a foot to press into her lower back and then move away. As if it’s meant to be some sort of greeting.

 _Yeah,_ she wants to say, but can’t. Something in her mouth keeps her from talking, her brain freezing the words so that all she can do is tug that folded up paper from her back pocket and throw it towards Kimberly.

Listen as she catches it, opens it, makes this small whining noise in the very back of her throat.

“What is this?” she asks and then she’s sitting beside Trini, turning the note over in her hands.

“Read much?”

Kimberly gives her this look and then Trini looks away.

Mumbles, “Sorry.”

“Didn’t peg you for a quitter,” Kimberly says next and she’s talking about every fight they’ve had so far, every civilian they saved, every putty they’ve taken down and they started on the wrong foot, maybe.

They fought Rita and tried to win without doing what she’d done--without the weight of the metal arm coming down, hitting her body, dwarfed by metal and the clanking creak of Trini moving it too quickly. But some things are necessary.

And Trini must have killed her. Must have taken her life. And what does that do to you? What does it mean? You can't claim to be a good guy and then turn around and kill the enemy. So maybe this is justice.

“I’m not,” she says, because she _isn’t_ quitting. She isn’t giving up.

But sometimes there’s nothing you can do.

Kimberly hums distantly. “You can still do these things,” she says after a moment. “Some of them.”

“Yeah? Which?” Trini asks, voice biting, voice bitter.

A brief pause as the question hangs there between them. Birds are chirping happily and it’s still early. There’s still plenty of time in the day.

Her brothers are at home, her mother is at home, her father is there too. They’re at home and she’s sitting here because she can’t bear the thought of looking at them and _knowing._

Knowing what they don’t.

“Whichever,” says Kimberly, her teammate and as terrified as Trini is, thinking of her death at the hands of someone else, the deaths of her family and the others she loves, of Rita Repulsa who’d turned herself to ash trying to tell them they wouldn’t win. “Whatever we have time for.”

.

What she loves about Kimberly: that careful tug of the wrist to pull Trini to her feet and the way she smiles as she does it. The way she doesn’t let go of her hand.

The way she leads her to her house and up the stairs, to her bedroom, without question, opens up her drawers like a maniac and then hands her three clean pairs of socks, balling them up.

“There,” she says and Trini loves her so ardently she can’t breathe for a moment. She nearly cries.

Manages not to.

“There what?”

Kimberly crosses her arms over her chest. “Juggle,” she says.

.

Juggling is hard. After three tutorial videos on YouTube, Trini gives up and drops the balled up socks to Kimberly’s bedroom floor, flopping backwards on her bed and sighing.

“I give up,” she says and Kimberly giggles -- Honest-to-God _giggles --_ at her from behind her, presses her ankle to the top of Trini’s head.

“So you _are_ a quitter, then?”

And Trini isn’t, of course, and she’s all too eager to prove the fact.

It takes three hours and even then, the skill is only tamped down to about six seconds of glory as she juggles the three pairs of socks while Kimberly laughs and laughs and Trini has nearly forgotten that feeling inside of her by the time she inevitably fumbles.

“I think that counts,” Kimberly decides and she leans over the bed where Trini’s list is laid down and crosses out one of the lines.

Trini very nearly says that she’s _certain_ that’s not how it works, but Kimberly is smiling in that way she can’t deny, and she doesn’t get the chance before her mother texts her a minute later to tell her to come home.

.

This is what she finds when she gets there:

Her family’s dark blue house, green shutters and the lights on in the upstairs hallway, in the living room, lit up like they’re waiting for her as the streetlamps flicker on.

The lawn is impossibly green for drought season and she toes the sidewalk by the driveway for a solid ten seconds before she realizes that Jason’s truck is parked on the street in front.

She can just make out the curve of his jaw as he turns his head to look at her, that darkened silhouette. Against her better judgement, her traitorous legs know the way.

“Hey,” she mutters half-heartedly when he leans across the seats to roll the window down.

He pauses once it’s open, lips parted as he comes up with what he says next. “Hey.”

A dog up the street is barking and her mother is saying something inside the house, the noise interrupted momentarily by her brothers’ delighted peals of laughter.

“Do you have an appointment?” Trini tries, trying to make her voice sound breezy and unaffected, unapologetic, even, save for the acidic taste of regret on the tip of her tongue. “Cause my secretary --”

She doesn’t get to finish.

Jason cuts her off with a harsh sigh and then he rubs a hand over his face, as if exhausted. “Look, Trin...I know that…”

She knows what’s coming. The long-winded explanation of how they’re going to _die_ or maybe _not-die,_ depending on how Jason wants to spin it -- on how particularly _leader-y_ he feels. Their gallant shepherd, always ready with a twist of the story to keep them on their feet, to keep them from falling backwards.

She’s heard it enough in the past nine months.

“That’s okay,” she says, one hand up in a gesture meant to either make him stop or convey her surrender.

Perhaps both.

Jason frowns, pretty and careful as always. She can make out the gentle dip of his lower lip in the shadows and has half a mind to tell him to _stop._ Stop looking so damn hopeful all the time.

Sometimes the good guys lose.

And it’s okay because, once it happens, there won’t be anyone around to care anymore anyway.

“Are you sure?” he asks, like he doesn’t believe her.

But she’s just had five hours with Kimberly Hart, hearing her laugh and occasionally being blessed with the brush of her fingers against Trini’s own. And it had been a good enough day, even if it’s one of her last. She thinks it’s a decent enough way to go.

“Yeah,” she tells him, “I’m sure.”

He doesn’t leave for another two minutes, but she turns on her heel right then and only sends him a wave once she’s reached the front porch.

Sometime after her brothers nearly tackle her to the floor in excitement and her mother sends a less-clipped-than-usual, “Where were you all day?” her way, she sees his headlights turn on and hears the tell-tale sound of him rumbling away, up the street and back home.

.

“What else?” asks Kimberly’s voice from nine-and-a-quarter miles away the next evening, voice muted and subdued on the other end.

Trini presses her phone into her ear until it stings. “Huh?”

Zack’s text message -- his bitter, _get over urself,_ sent immediately after her departure from detention and opened only this morning, accompanied by a hurried, _sorry_ \-- is still shining brightly behind her eyelids every time she blinks, clear and white and angry as ever. She’s being selfish.

When, she wants to ask, is she not?

“On your list?” Kimberly clarifies. “There’s some weird stuff on there, but…refresh my memory.”

“They’re stupid,” Trini says, too quickly to mean it. “We got the only one I cared about anyway.”

Kimberly breathes across the line. Trini can practically feel it brush against the heat of her own cheek, pushing her hair away from her face.

“How long have we known each other?”

“Huh?”

“I can tell when you’re lying.”

 _Oh_.

“Your voice does this weird gravelly thing.”

Trini flops backwards onto her bed and toes off her shoes, thumb hovering over the little red button on her screen. She doesn’t press it. There’s no point to it.

Kimberly would just call her back.

“Anyway, good thing I took a picture of it.”

There’s something Trini doesn’t understand in the way they’re talking, in the slight tilt to Kimberly’s words. As if there are multiple layers, something deep and clear like a lake under a layer of ice, and Trini wants to ask if she’s imagining it, but she’s scared of the answer.

“Vote?” comes Kimberly’s voice. “Like...for what, exactly?”

“I don’t know. For president? Just seems like something you do when you’re older.”

Kimberly hums and Trini picks at a loose thread on her mattress absently -- wraps it around the first knuckle of her index finger until the tight pull of it against her skin hurts and she’s certain, without looking, that the digit is turning deep purple.

There’s this sound on the other end, this mysterious noise that makes her breathless and frightened. Almost as if Kimberly’s breath has been caught in the very back of her throat.

“Okay,” she says.

Like that wasn’t quite what she’d been about to say.

“What?” Trini asks. She sits up, braces her elbows against the bed, and is staring intently at the space in front of her wall, not the wall itself. Those pictures her brother painted right after everything with Rita, long since dried, but still shimmering in the low lighting of her lamp.

“Nothing,” Kimberly lies.

Trini knows it’s a lie from the way she hesitates.

“I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

Trini nods helplessly. “Okay.”

And Kimberly hangs up, the conversation, it would seem, ended.

.

She’s never had much control when it comes to Kimberly Hart. Not ever. Not even from the start -- seeing her across the hallway and not being able to stop herself from wondering who she was because _who was she?_

And then she found out, of course. More than. She found out some and then they learned more together after Kimberly tugged her off that cliff.

She let her _pull her off a cliff._ That’s proof enough that she doesn’t know what’s happening.

Kimberly says ‘jump’, Trini asks, ‘off what?’

Hey: the good part is that she’s yet to scare Kimberly off. Not even towards the middle there -- the earlier-ish months when she’d been too eager, too happy to prove herself and her affection -- and maybe that’s what friendship is usually built off anyway.

But: it can be so inconvenient that she ends the days wanting to crawl under a rock instead of ever facing the world again. Because, here’s the thing:

You don’t want to cute girl you sort of _have_ to be friends with to know she has a pull on you.

A vexing for-instance: that first night after they’d beaten Rita, Kimberly had come knocking on her window and her heart had leapt into her throat, armor itching to spread up her palms and arms and chest. But it wasn’t Rita, of course.

Because Rita is in space somewhere. Hopefully lost forever.

No, it was Kimberly Hart perched on the outside window ledge in her pajamas -- or what she was trying to _pass_ as pajamas, that is (though Trini was positive that those shorts were not covering nearly enough for a frolic through the streets of Angel Grove at midnight).

That had been enough to cause her panic attack to stumble into some sort of _other_ embarrassing attack -- her ears flushing bright red and making her look, altogether, like she had a fever or something worse. And then Kimberly had conveyed that she wasn’t able to sleep, and could she stay the night? She can sleep on the floor.

But Trini had just stammered out some sort of argument that _she_ could take the floor, and they’d ended up in the bed together anyway. She’d barely slept at all and, when she’d finally drifted off to sleep, she’d been awakened with the sun to Kimberly crawling back out her window to scale the side of the house again.

(It happened three more times that month alone, and after that Trini stopped being surprised when Kimberly would appear at her window after tougher days that left them bruised and battered in the darkness of a cave filled with the booming, disappointed voice of someone they’ll never be good enough for)

Here’s another: Kimberly dragging Trini to her own house one Friday evening in January after training and icing her black eye for three hours. It wasn’t the first time Trini had been there, but it was certainly the longest. They’d fallen asleep in front of the TV and it wasn’t until Kimberly’s parents got home much later that they woke up.

Neither of them brings it up. Kimberly especially. Like some unspoken understanding that sometimes you just need to be held. Because that’s what friends do -- female friends especially (maybe. Trini doesn’t actually know because she doesn’t have much previous experience to hold it up against, but sometimes she wonders at the firm way Kimberly’s arms will slip around her waist in the middle of the night and then it takes all of her willpower to stop _reading into it_ ).

(And then there are the dreams. The ones her mother would click her tongue at and call ‘normal’ if she knew only the bare shape of them — in that way she always does when she forces the awkward “this is just as bad for me as it is for you” sex talk on her daughter, usually once a month, pushing dental dams and latex gloves towards her across the kitchen counter and saying, “Be safe, honey,” and, “Sex dreams are completely normal, baby. They _are_ ,” and it’s too much, usually. Way too much.

But she dreams of Kimberly pressing her into a rocky wall or pressing slender fingers against the button of her jeans in the chilly water of the cave, Kimberly panting into her ear and her breath hot and --)

 _Okay_ : Kimberly in her bedroom unexpectedly that night, four hours after she hangs up.

Trini comes into the room from the hallway to find her standing there in a stolen shirt of Billy’s that says, _Let’s have a moment of science_ , watching as she slides in and closes the door, shifting her weight nervously.

It’s a first.

Trini’s hair is damp from the shower and she drops the towel she’d been running through it on the bed and crosses her arms. “What are you doing here?”

“Something stupid,” says Kimberly. In the dictionary, next to _bewildered_ there’s a picture of Trini as she watches Kimberly drop down to one knee and pulls one of the rings from her right hand off and holds it up. “Marry me.”

“Kim,” says Trini, her voice shaking only the slightest bit. “What the fuck?”

“It’s on your list,” says Kimberly, still on one knee.

“We can’t get _married_ ,” says Trini, her arms crossed over her stomach, her hair dripping dark spots of water through her shirt, and a perfectly schooled expression.

“Why not? We love each other, right?”

(And the way she asks it--the hopeful look in her eyes; the fact that, for all of her weird dreams Trini never imagined _this_ \-- has Trini stumped.)

 _I don’t want this to be why,_ Trini wants to say, but doesn’t.

Mostly because she doesn’t have enough words for it, enough saliva in her mouth to make it possible with Kimberly still down on one fucking knee.

“Trin,” Kimberly says, after a moment, arms shaking, “this position is really uncomfortable, so if you could maybe answer, that would be great.”

“My mom would kill me.”

“She’ll _murder_ us both. We might die anyway.”

“What would the guys say?”

“Who cares?”

“We’re too _young_ for this.”

“We’re too young to save the world, but we did that, too. Checkmate.”

“You don’t...We’re not like that.”

At this, Kimberly doesn’t respond. She just quirks an eyebrow as if to say, _Really? We’re_ **_not_ ** _?_

Because so many nights spent together and that time they’d been walking home and Kimberly had caught Trini’s hand in her own and lacing their fingers together had been the next logical step anyway.

Or all those times Kimberly smiles at her like there are other things she’d like to do to her that _don’t_ involve smiling. But Trini was half-certain she was making that up.

Now, she’s not so sure.

“Trini,” Kimberly says and she’s on her feet, crossing the space between them and still holding that ring. “Just say yes.”

Her heart is stuttering, swallowed by something, some heat she couldn’t describe if she tried. Kimberly is so close and they’ve been close before, but Kimberly was never in the midst of some ill-planned marriage proposal. Her eyes are warm and there’s a spark in them that looks familiar, but Trini can’t quite place why.

One of her hands comes out and grabs onto Trini’s wrist, warm and careful as her fingers circle her wrist, thumb stroking down the skin. If they were any closer, if Trini was anyone else, someone who wasn’t plagued, constantly, by self-doubt, she might have rocked forward on her toes, might have bridged the gap and closed her eyes and said, _Yes,_ into the warm cave of Kimberly’s mouth.

Instead, all she can manage without her voice shaking is a quiet, “Okay,” that makes Kimberly’s face nearly split when she grins anyway.

“Really?” she asks, teeth impossibly bright in the dim bedroom.

“Really,” Trini says. “Put the damn ring on me.”

It’s too big. It slips down the knuckle of Trini’s left ring finger and almost falls off.

Kimberly doesn’t stop grinning, even when she lingers at the window twenty minutes later and Trini pushes her out the rest of the way.

.

“I’m not even sure what the point to this is,” Zack says, gesturing to the center of the pit where Billy and Kimberly are duking it out in their armor. Jason is watching from the sidelines, dark circles under his eyes and Trini is trying to remember if he’d looked that exhausted the last time she’d seen him, on Saturday.

It’s Monday now and that emptiness inside of her is only getting bigger each day and this is Zack’s equivalent of a peace flag.

Trini observes Kimberly, the slight, skinny bones of her wrists and the pink curvature of her neck, the darkness of her armor.

“Look at what training did last time: didn’t exactly prepare us for the fucking giant robot Zord and our fist-fighting almost got us all killed.”

Trini frowns. “We still won.”

Zack’s brows pull together. The foundation of their friendship has always been built on this: weird behavior must always, always be discussed and questioned. “What’s with the change of heart?”

Trini is just on the verge of rolling her eyes when Jason whistles. “Zack! You’re up!”

From below -- the dirty, sandy pit that has breathable air only by some unexplained force of the universe that _requires_ it to -- Kimberly sheds her armor and jogs over, rolling her shoulders as she comes to a halt in front of Zack, who is beginning to pull himself to his feet.

“Sir, yes, sir!” Zack says, voice sharp, eyes bright with unreleased laughter. It’s on jokes like this that they’d built the meaning of their duty, the duty that might just now get them killed. “Oh, Captain, my Captain!"

“Hey,” Kimberly says and pulls herself up to sit beside Trini, who immediately ducks her head.

It’s just another day. Nothing is different.

Even if Kimberly is wearing one of her rings on her own left hand now too.

“Why’s Zack frowning so much?”

That’s the question of the ages, but his armor is immediately slipping up to cover his face from view, so Trini doesn’t have long enough to _wonder_.

“Probably because we’re probably going to die,” she says.

The moment is stiff suddenly, air unmoving, Kimberly unblinking and then she lets out the lightest, most bright laugh that Trini has ever heard in all her years. It makes her ears ache with longing and she nearly falls over.

“Fair point,” Kimberly says when the sudden noise brings the boys’ eyes turning their way. She waves off their stares and it’s only once they’re turned that she grabs Trini’s hand and doesn’t let go.

..

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title from "Promises" by Day Wave.


	2. our ties become part of the way we survive

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you all so much for the feedback! i'll try to reply to all of you as soon as i can! 
> 
> hoping you're all liking it so far! i'm gonna try to post at least every 2-3 days, so this should all be up in about a week or so.
> 
> thank you, again! read on.

..

So this is what it means to have a fiancée.

Or what it must mean for her because she has no prior experience; she will have no more experience than Kimberly offering her a ride to school as she pushes her wet hair from the edges of her face.

“Sure,” she says and Kimberly drives them slowly, follows Jason’s truck and changes her shirt in the school parking lot to one that isn’t sopping wet.

And maybe having a fiancée means she shouldn’t blush so much when she looks away, the bright purple of Kimberly’s bra lingering in the darkness of her eyelids with each blink for a long time afterwards. But she does anyway. She pretends to be interested in the mechanics of the window, pressing at the button as if the child-lock isn’t on. She fiddles with her backpack on her lap until Kimberly says, “You’re good,” and draws her eyes back up.

Then it’s out the car and around the other side, heading up the sidewalk together.

“Ready?” Kimberly asks outside the school, still following the boys slowly -- watching Zack drag his feet as Jason pulls him along by the forearm.

Trini frowns at her. “Yeah,” she says.

Having a fiancée is:

“Can I…?” in a shaking tone as Kimberly pushes her hand closer to Trini’s.

It’s:

“Um...Yeah.”

And then warm fingers laced between her own as the door opens.

No one looks at them. No one cares.

Not even Jason bats an eyelash.

It’s weird, she thinks, because her and Kimberly have held hands before -- watching movies together in the dark; in the darkness of one of their bedrooms, safely hidden by the covers -- but it isn’t as if they’ve done it at school. It isn’t as if it’s ever really meant to mean something  _ else.  _ Now it does, and no one even notices.

“Try not to fall asleep,” Kimberly says outside Trini’s homeroom, her right thumb pressing flat and rubbing smooth along the surface of the ring she’d slipped on Trini’s finger in the early hours of that same morning. “I’ll see you at lunch.” 

“Sure.”

And when Kimberly presses a warm kiss to Trini’s cheek, it’s normal.

Expected.

But it keeps her standing outside the door for a long time. Or, at least, until Kimberly has rounded the far corner and disappeared for the next two hours.

.

_ should we tell them ?  _ is the text Kimberly sends her at lunch, fingers pounding furiously across her touch screen from underneath the table.

_ idk,  _ is Trini’s answer and it’s particularly unenthused.

Zack is eating too quickly, his cheeks tinting a little in the beginnings of some sick shade of green. Jason has his head bowed and he’s writing furiously in a notebook. Billy is slumped tiredly beside him.

It’s not the right time. Besides, Trini doesn’t know how to say,  _ Hey, by the way, Kimmy and I are getting married sometime before whatever’s coming kills us. You guys cool with being in the bridal party?  _

Or, she knows how to say it. The phrasing isn’t the problem. Ill-timed jokes come to her just as easily as anything. The problem is the way her mouth dries up at the looks she’ll get.

The smirk Zack will send her way, along with a barrage of questions about her being a bottom -- or something just as equally inappropriate for school. Or Billy’s over excited smile. His knowing eyes and his careful, “Congratulations,” that will immediately feel like too much. Like more than she deserves.

She’s frightened, too, of the potential jealousy in Jason’s face when he realizes that Kimberly has officially passed him up -- forever -- to marry her female best friend. The weeks of  _ will-they-or-won’t-they  _ that Kimberly had been seemingly oblivious too aren’t so far in the past that Trini has completely forgotten.

Anyway, it’s not the time.

Kimberly looks at her out of the corner of her eye, just this careful glance that seems to be a gentle reminder of what’s lying unspoken between them all. The fear, the judgment. The  _ engagement. _ Her fingers brush against Trini’s arm and then circle around her wrist, thumbing gently at her pulse point and tapping the rest of her fingers against Trini’s hand to the tempo of her heartbeat.

When Trini finally looks away from the line of Kimberly’s jaw, from the slight curls of her hair, Zack is staring at her with some limp pieces of spaghetti strangled between his lips. He smirks.

“What?” she sneers and he shakes his head.

Looks away.

“Nothing,” he mumbles around his food and then slurps the noodles into his mouth so hard a stray piece of tomato sauce ends up on the curve of his cheekbone.

.

The invitation is waiting for her at her locker.

So is Kimberly.

“What’s that?” Trini asks, nodding to the two individual envelopes lying on the top shelf of the locker. 

Kimberly, pen held between her teeth, has not noticed them. She meets Trini’s eyes for a moment and then flips her head around to get a look. She frowns around the pen, dropping it too loosely and it’s clicked open. She gets a smudge of ink on her chin and then garbles unintelligibly.

Translation: “I don’t know.”

Trini smiles at her, then reaches up and rubs away the spot of ink on the corner of Kimberly’s lip with the pad of her thumb. The moment lasts a little longer than it should, which Trini chalks up to a lot of things:

The mull of kids leaving around them, a hundred judging eyes watching them as they’re jostled past on the way to the door. It could also have something to do with the hand she used, the fact that Kimberly’s ring -- presented just fourteen hours ago in her bedroom -- is hanging loosely around Trini’s left ring finger.

Kimberly watches her carefully, thickly. Like she’s waiting for something, too.

Trini pulls her hand away and grabs for one of the envelopes, ripping it open jaggedly. 

It’s a party invitation. And not a good one. It’s a bright blue photocopy of someone’s lousy handwriting on a piece of notebook paper. Kimberly leans over her shoulder to read it. It’s the kind of shoddy workmanship you’d expect from someone like --

“Jason,” Kimberly says quietly.

Trini frowns. “You know, I was gonna say the same thing.”

“No,” Kimberly interrupts. “That’s his handwriting.” She tugs the paper out of Trini’s hand so that she can inspect it more closely, holding it but a few inches from the tip of her nose. “What’s he doing throwing a house party?”

She stops reading it and looks over at Trini, as if she’s expected to have any more clue than Kimberly does. She doesn’t.

Trini is certain she doesn’t know.

.

“It’s just for fun,” is his answer when they corner him in the parking lot. He’s got his back up against the door of his truck and Billy is waiting for the other door to be unlocked, peering through the dirty windows to watch. 

“I mean, yeah, that’s what parties are usually for,” Kimberly says. “But you’re allergic to fun.”

Jason stands up straight, holding his pointer finger towards the accusation. “Hey, now, I’m not --”

“She’s right,” Trini cuts in, and he swings his eyes over to look at her, utterly defeated. She shrugs. “What?”

“It’s on a Tuesday night, Jason. A school night,” Kimberly is saying. “Earlier this year, you yelled at us for twenty minutes for going to see a  _ movie  _ on a school night.”

He had, but in his defense, Trini thinks, she’d suggested an earlier showing that Kimberly had argued for a later one and then fallen asleep on her lunch tray the next afternoon, prompting the admonishment. She keeps her lips pressed tight and inches closer to her fiancée rather than saying anything regarding this.

“What’s going on?” Billy asks, coming around the nose of the car and drumming his fingers nervously on the metal hood. 

“Nothing, Billy,” Jason tells him, voice soft as he turns to the other boy. “The girls just don’t want to come to the party, that’s all.”

Billy’s face falls. “But it’s going to be so fun! We’re going to Party City right now!”

That seems...unlikely, to say the least. Trini scrambles in her backpack to pull the invitation out, just to double check, only to be met with Jason’s sloppy handwriting spelling out Billy’s home address rather than his own. 

“Billy’s in charge of the theme?” Kimberly asks, smirking. “That’s more like the you we know and tolerate.” She glances over at Trini for a moment and then turns back. “We’ll be there.”

And then she turns on her heel, gathering Trini’s free hand in her own to tug her across the parking lot and towards her car on the other side. Behind them, she can just hear Jason scoffing and saying, “Tolerate?” in this high-pitched whine that makes her ears sing.

Kimberly laughs under her breath, squeezes Trini’s hand three times in a row, and Trini promptly forgets the,  _ We will be?  _ that’s right on the tip of her tongue.

.

Trini doesn’t want to go home, so they end up at the mall one town over. Normally afternoon training fills the awkward hours between school dismissal and family dinner, and, without that, Trini isn’t sure how much she really wants to go home and twist with guilt under her mother’s deliberate stare.

Breakfast had been bad enough.

“How’s this one?” Kimberly asks from the other side of the spinning rack that’s between them. She peeks her head around the edge and holds up a ring. 

It’s a gold band with a tiny, plastic unicorn head on it.

Trini grimaces. “I’m going to kill you.”

Kimberly laughs and then clucks her tongue. “That’s no way to talk to your future wife.”

The phrase sends a spark of  _ something  _ down Trini’s chest and into the low of her gut. Her hands tremble and she sets the ring with a doughnut on it she’d been looking at it back on the peg, trying to look unaffected. 

“Well, apparently my future wife doesn’t know me at all,” she fires back. “So there’s that. Maybe I should marry someone else.”

It’s a joke. She’s only kidding, but she keeps her eyes down anyway.

And then Kimberly is sliding up next to her, draping an arm around Trini’s waist and tugging her into her side, pressing a kiss to Trini’s temple. “You wouldn’t dare,” she says and--

The thing is: Trini wouldn’t.

It takes another fifteen minutes of digging around the store -- one of those ones targeted solely to girls between the ages of ten to fifteen, so everything is  _ doughnuts  _ and  _ flowers  _ and kitschy. Eventually, there’s a silver ring with a small, pink rose on it.

“Perfect,” Kimberly says when Trini tries it on.

And there’s one with a yellow rose on it for her.

.

Alex has a nightmare that night and Trini awakens with her phone blinking  _ 3:03 AM  _ at her in the darkness. She’d fallen asleep with Kimberly on the other end of the phone, voices drifting sleepily like ghosts across the distance as they discussed graduation, Jason’s party tomorrow, anything but things they might be running out of time for. And now her little brother is standing beside her bed. She jumps in surprise at the sight of him, and then sits up, lets out a deep sigh, a quiet:

“What’s wrong?”

“I had a dream,” he tells her.

She frowns. “What sort of dream?”

His only answer is a whimper and this is not new. They used to be worse, used to wake them all up in the middle of the night with him yelling and kicking. Swimming under a waterfall too strong to get out from under; another car smashing into theirs on the way home; rock monsters and golden giants smashing molten fists into his bedroom window.

The examples go on. 

Trini scoots over to the other side of her bed and lifts up her covers so that he can slide in.

“Thanks,” he whispers and she throws a gentle arm around him, presses a kiss to the back of his messy brown curls. This is one of the things she might be running out of time for. How many more nights will she have the chance to do this?

He’s gotten too old to fall into her or her parents’ arms without squirming right back out these days.

“What are big sisters for?” she asks and he laughs faintly, already drifting back off into sleep.

Then: 

“Love you, Trini,” said so sleepily she almost misses it.

She holds her little brother in the darkness, aching for the loss of something she’s still lucky enough to have right now. “Love you, too,” she says, but he’s already asleep.

Most nights, she has nightmares too. These days especially. But it’s basic kid logic that having someone else there sends the monsters packing and it’s no less true for her than it is for her brother.

.

Always punctual, Kimberly arrives at six to pick her up for a party that starts at eight. “I just like to be early,” she says on the doorstep of Trini’s house, smirking already.

Trini would laugh, would rib her for it, but this is her  _ fiancée  _ and Kimberly looks beautiful in the fading evening light of May. She almost forgets to breathe.

“Fine,” she says eventually, schooling her tone into a thing that sounds less affected than she is. “But I need a minute to finish getting ready.”

Mostly, she realizes as she wiggles her socked toes into the carpet of the living room, she needs to put her shoes on, but seeing Kimberly with hair perfectly styled, her lips more glossed than usual, she feels exceedingly less ready to go than she had before the doorbell rang.

“Oh, Kimberly. You’re here.”

June is standing in the doorway of the dining room, smiling with a plate she’s still drying between her hands, her default setting. Kimberly stiffens and her smirk slides away, but she smiles a little more forced than is typical. 

“I am,” she says, sounding nervous. 

Trini elbows her in the ribs, a motion that her mother tracks with her eyes carefully until both girls are still.

“You look lovely,” is June’s next sentence. “Have my baby home by midnight, please.”

But --

“It’s a school night,” Trini reminds her, frowning. Her curfew has always been ten on days before today, even on the weekends. “Isn’t that late?”

June crosses the ten feet of carpeting keeping them apart and leans over, pressing a kiss to Trini’s forehead so quickly that Trini doesn’t even have it in her mind to pull away before she can. “Maybe for people who aren’t eighteen.”

Trini stares at her mother, spinning that ring they’d bought together around her ring finger nervously. Guilt twists a little in her stomach and then replaces itself immediately with the nervous tremors of surprise when she feels the heat of Kimberly’s fingers against the small of her back through her shirt.

“Oh,” she manages. Then, “Thanks.”

June smiles.

“Thank you,” Kimberly says quietly and then June is back in the kitchen, the sink on at full blast as she finishes cleaning up after dinner.

In the quiet of the living room, Kimberly and Trini stare at each other. Upstairs, she can hear her brothers yelling and laughing and her dad is outside mowing the lawn. She can hear him through the open window in the kitchen.

“You gonna go get ready so we can go, or are we gonna stare at each other all night?” Kimberly asks, breaking the spell.

Trini shoves her on her way up the stairs.

.

By the time they arrive at Billy’s house, the party is in full swing, Zack at the foreground of the whole thing, opening the door with a cheesy smile that Trini feels herself respond to on basic instinct.

“Took you long enough,” he says, blocking them from entering. “What’s the password?”

“I thought no one good showed up early to a party,” Trini snarks and Kimberly chuckles low, vibrating chest against Trini’s shoulder. The Cranston’s front porch is a tight fit, but perhaps not so tight as to permit this sort of proximity.

“Been a while since a Scott party. The people were eager,” he tells them, shrugging loose and easy. “Guess you’re the only ones who didn’t get the memo.”

“If you’re referring to the invitation a seven-year-old left in our locker,” Kimberly begins, pushing past him and into the house, “then we got it.”

Zack laughs and brushes his hand against Trini’s elbow as they enter. She smiles at him, watches as he shuts the door behind them. 

This is her first high school party. Basically. 

( She doubts the one her and her only friend at her last school crashed on Halloween counts -- they’d stayed for five minutes and, upon seeing that keg stand competitions were more than Hollywood High School myth, turned tail and went home )

This isn’t so different from that -- teenagers sprawled across the room, some bobbing to music playing from the corner of the room. Billy’s mom must not be around -- gone for the night perhaps -- because there’s no way Candace Cranston would allow a game of beer pong in the dining room. Trini eyes the partygoers carefully, wearily. She recognizes some of them from various classes, but none of them have ever been associated with anything other than several stilted conversations regarding assigned homework partnership or a guarded conversation in greeting once or twice otherwise.

Kimberly is stiff beside her, hands hanging loosely at her sides and Trini grabs one of them and squeezes her fingers, making Kimberly turn and smile at her.

Courageous and dazzling Kimberly. She’s afraid of these kids, these people who once thought of her as one of her own -- still do, perhaps. The frivolous hierarchy of high school culture is much easier to forget the closer to graduation day it becomes. Here they are, maybe, smiling at the two of them -- Kimberly, one of their most renowned defectors and Trini who’s never quite been absorbed into their ranks.

Before she can ask if she’s okay, Billy comes swinging out of the kitchen with a cup in his hand, grinning at them even as his shoulders are stiff at the mere presence of his home invaders. This was Jason’s idea, she knows. And Billy has always been the most loyal of them all. If Jason wants a party, Billy is going to give him one.

“Hey, guys!” he calls out. “You made it!” 

It’s a nice moment -- Billy smiling like that -- and, of course it’s ruined by the memory of him cold and still on the dock all those months ago. The chill of his skin through his sweater as she’d held one side of him, Kimberly on the other and crying so constantly that she was glad Jason and Zack were leading. She’d never have been able to see enough to find the way on her own otherwise.

(Trini still has nightmares. Of course she does.)

Anyway: it isn’t until he’s halfway across the room that she sees the decorations. The Christmas lights strung up on the walls, the fake cobwebs and red, white, and blue stars taped below them, and the American flag table cloth on the refreshment table. 

“Couldn’t pick a theme?” she asks as Billy gets close and he frowns for a moment, eyebrows lowered over his eyes before he seems to understand the question. 

“Oh! It was Jason’s idea,” he explains. “All the holidays that we might miss if we --”

“If we die,” Kimberly finishes from beside her. “Cheery.”

Billy doesn’t to have an answer for that and neither does Zack, it seems, who is still hovering just beside them. It’s quiet just a moment too long, the four of them settling into the weighty silence of understanding -- of what’s to come, how little time they might have left. 

Kimberly squeezes Trini’s fingers and then lets go of her hand to wrap that arm around her waist, drawing her closer into her own side. Trini nearly stiffens, unused to how freely affection has been given between them since that night in her bedroom. For just a second, she’s aware of the cool warmth of the ring on her finger as she leans further into Kimberly’s side instead.

She’s dizzy from the contact, the low warmth of Kimberly through the back of her shirt, right above her waist in the dip of her back. She’s nervous -- giddy -- with the number of faces she can see. All these kids laughing and talking and, overall, not nearly as drunk and disorderly as she’d expected. 

Billy is staring at her, something incomprehensible on his face.

It’s meant to be a nice gesture, she supposes. The party, that is. Jason’s special way of making light of the whole thing. His own brand of humor, perhaps. She’s willing to let it slide. Maybe because she might not have a lot of time left with him and being hurt over the crassness of the whole thing is nothing but a time-waster.

“Okay, moment’s passed. Can we stop moping in the corner like losers now?”

The question sits on top of the air for a moment, barely heard over the buzz of the others occupying the room, almost like none of them know what to say to that. And then Kimberly grins, huge and bright. “I’m down,” she says, pulling Trini impossibly further into her side, meeting her eye and looking as lovely as -- as something. Trini isn’t sure what.

Lovelier than she had before, maybe (if that’s possible).

And then Kimberly’s forefinger comes up to poke Trini’s nose, making her jump and shake her head in confusion, before letting a smile (unwittingly) free at last.

It’s Zack who gets them drinks (beer for Kimberly, punch for Trini), who says, “Don’t let the fake I.D. I made go to waste,” and then squirms away when Kimberly grabs at him, trying to pull out his wallet so she can look at it. And Trini laughs, smiles, feels loose and unfettered from her place by the wall with Billy laughing, leaning into her shoulder, beside her.

Anyway. Later, Kimberly smiles at her in the kitchen and says, “Sorry,” in this quiet voice that Trini has no idea what to do with.

“For what?” Trini asks.

They’re alone in the kitchen and Billy has started a ridiculous game of Monopoly out in the living room, Jason laughing along. She can hear Zack yelling something about being the banker for the fifth time in two minutes and the music is much too loud, beer pong has turned into flip cup in the dining room.

Kimberly rolls her eyes, still smiling vaguely. “The party. Dragging you here.” 

“You didn’t drag me here, Kim.”

“Okay, but party’s just --” Kimberly trails off, looking away and leaning back against the counter. 

“What?” Trini asks. “Aren’t my thing?” 

The look Kimberly gives her -- half-guilty, half-apologetic -- says it all.

So Trini grabs her beer out of her hand and takes a drink from it, ignoring her earlier promise to DD for the evening in favor of the satisfying burn on the roof of her mouth. Leave it to Zack to scrape together beer this hoppy. She winces, head shaking a little as she hands it back and schools her expression before Kimberly can laugh at her.

“Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do in relationships?” she asks, liking the way the question makes Kimberly’s head tilt in confusion, in askance, waiting for clarification. “If I’m gonna marry the head cheerleader, I might wanna get used to underage drinking.”

A joke. Meant to lighten the mood. 

Kimberly makes this face like she’s torn between laughing and correcting her --  _ Former head cheerleader,  _ maybe.

Except -- 

“ _ Marry _ ?” 

It’s Jason’s voice, hushed with alarm at what he’s just heard. When she turns her head, he’s standing there in the doorway, lips parted and dry as his eyes dart between the two of them -- these girls, his  _ teammates,  _ who he’s meant to lead and understand and  _ know  _ and yet --

“What?” He manages a second question, throat releasing it in a quiet croak of surprise, of rejection.

Trini swallows thickly and meets Kimberly’s eyes for a moment. Two days.

That’s as long as it was able to be just theirs.

“Um, yeah,” Kimberly starts. Her hand reaches out and grapples for Trini’s and Trini grabs hold tightly. “Um, I sort of...asked Trini to marry me.” 

Jason’s eyes are wide as he stares at her, his empty cup dropped down to his side. He’d come in for a refill, no doubt. Or to invite them to the game if only so Zack could have someone else to inflict the “power of the banker” on. Now he’s standing in Billy’s kitchen doorway and Trini is half-certain he isn’t breathing.

“And I sort of said yes,” she cuts in, finishing the explanation. 

“Sort of?” Jason repeats, capable only of repeating phrases now. 

Stunned into near silence.

Trini chafes. It’s a surprise, yes, but she hadn’t expected it to be  _ such  _ a surprise. 

_ The boys,  _ Kimberly had said just last night on the phone, voice breathy in Trini’s ear,  _ will be fine with it. _

But there were weeks at first that Trini had been certain Kimberly would fall into Jason’s arms because  _ that’s how these things go.  _ Zack had propositioned her for a bet over the whole thing and huffed and puffed in November, on the verge of thanking her, maybe, for not taking him up on it. He’d have lost all his money, he’d reasoned and Trini had been relieved but she hadn’t let herself think of the  _ why  _ behind it until Kimberly was down on one knee in front of her offering her something that might not have come if their fate weren’t hanging on like a Tooth-Fairy-bound baby tooth or something equally as ridiculous.

She’d forgotten sometime between sleepovers and gentle touches that Kimberly and her had never really discussed, about those times  _ before.  _ When her and Jason would talk lowly between themselves in the aftermath of Rita. But she’s reminded in his blank stare as she stands in Billy Cranston’s kitchen with her fiancée at her side.

“You’re getting married?” He asks it like it’s one of the most surprising turn of events he’s ever witnessed.

Trini imagines he might have been less shocked the morning after that train accident, after the coins.

She crosses her arm and cocks her hip, fixing him with a glare she has to force herself to mean. Right on the cusp of telling him off for the way his mouth won’t close, she’s cut off by Zack coming into the room, already frowning in his own confusion.

“Who’s getting married?” he asks, looking between the three of them. His eyes zero in on her and Kimberly, standing too close, perhaps. “Oh, fuck. Really?”

“You know,” Kimberly starts, a harsh edge of frustration to her voice. “I thought you two would be a lot more supportive than --”

But she doesn’t get a chance to finish.

Zack crosses the room in two great strides, his arms opening up to scoop them both up and tug them into a tight hug, lifting them a little. “Oh my fucking god! You guys!”

Kimberly meets her eyes around his head, smiling a little and they hug him back, his chest rumbling with laughter against them as he sets them back down and releases them from his hold. Some song with too much bass pumps through the walls and once she’s freed, Zack holds up a fist for Trini to bump. She meets his fist with hers, relief bubbling out of her chest as laughter as he bumps fists with Kimberly next. 

“Who asked who? This is fucking rad. I’m your best man, obviously. How do you guys feel about strippers?” He pauses, frowning at himself. “For your bachelorette parties, of course.”

It’s fitting, of course, that it doesn’t really hit her what marrying Kimberly  _ means  _ \-- what it  _ would  _ mean, maybe, under normal circumstances -- until he asks this. She hasn’t considered white dresses or save-the-dates or anything like that because she’s a  _ kid  _ still. She’s barely eighteen and they haven’t thought this through, but deadlines will do that to a person. Impending doom has a funny way of taking away all logic and reason.

“Zack, will you please comes tell them that if Adam P. doesn’t want to buy Park Place it has to go up for auction? Because they don’t believe me.”

And it’s probably the same destiny that brought them all to that old mine eight months ago that brings Billy into the kitchen with the rest of them, just as Zack is saying something about bachelorette parties.

“What are you guys talking about?” he asks, sensing, perhaps, the shifting mood of the room. Jason is still staring at them blankly, but he meets Billy’s gaze for a moment. “Is everything okay?”

“You wanna tell him, or should I?” Zack asks, throwing a look to the girls.

Kimberly is still smiling, albeit tentatively, as if she’s not sure that’s the appropriate emotional response to what’s currently going on. Trini shrugs at him, staring at Billy curiously.

Surely he won’t be as surprised as Jason, as  _ hurt --  _ because there’s no reason for him to be.

“Be my guest,” Trini says and Zack whips his head around to look at Billy, grinning huge.

“Trini and Kim are getting married!” he practically shrieks and Trini winces at his volume.

In a movie, the music in the next room would stop -- some record scratching noise as the revelation is reached by the rest of their peers one or two rooms over. In reality, she only knows everyone else has heard from the immediate rise of voices from the living room, then the dining room, then the hallway in between. 

_ Kimberly Hart? _

_ I had a feeling those two -- _

_ I thought her name was Deedee _ .

Kimberly sighs, long-suffering, and Jason looks down at the floor.

The moment, fortunately, perhaps, is broken by Billy who jumps a little in surprise and claps his hands together. “Are you serious?” he asks. “Oh!”

It’s a nice moment. Lighter than they’ve had in a long time. He hugs them, with permission, and Trini can nearly forget this whole engagement thing being outed to all their classmates by Zack. Normally, she’d hit him or something  _ at least.  _ Tonight, she settles for letting him hug her again and then watching as he bursts out of the room and back into the living room yelling, “Surprise engagement party, bitches!” and the music switches to something by Taylor Swift a moment later.

Billy laughs delighted and leaves to go help or  _ something  _ and then it’s just the two of them and Jason again.

“Jason, I’m --” Kimberly goes to say, but she stops herself short, her hand still holding Trini’s too tightly.

She’s not sorry, maybe. That’s why she stops.

Jason seems to understand that, too, and he looks at them, lips quirked up the tiniest bit. “Sorry I’m such a --” He sighs, and leans back against the fridge, setting his empty cup on the counter to cross his arms. “I just...I don’t think it hit me what might be coming.”

Not jealousy, then. But loss of hope. The same emotion, just under different duress. Trini can feel the anger leave her, as the chill of the air conditioning leeches it from the heat of her neck. 

“Didn’t mean to be an asshole,” he says, “and I’m happy for you guys. I just, uh. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t surprised.”

“Yeah, your poker face pretty much sucks.” There’s still an edge to Kimberly’s voice, but softer now. 

“Congratulations,” he says. “Really.” And when he opens his arms, they’re easy to fall into. He squeezes Kimberly, then Trini softly and Trini sighs against the fabric of his flannel overshirt until he pulls away, forgiven. 

In the living room, the room is abuzz with new energy. Kids Trini didn’t even know knew her name come up to her and Kimberly both, shaking their hands, smiling, grinning. Asking all sorts of questions she’s not prepared for. Congratulations abound.

“I’m rooting for you guys,” some girl named Katherine from her English class says. She looks suspiciously on the verge of tears and, when she catches Zack’s eye across the room, so does he.

Trini leans into Kimberly’s warmth on Billy’s couch, awash with the voices of a dozen people who’ll never really know her. Not really.

“Sorry,” Kimberly whispers into her hair, and Trini leans into her further, thinking that the dozens of other kids all around them can serve as a good enough excuse should Kimberly question it. 

“Don’t be,” Trini tells her and Kimberly presses a kiss, quick and easy, into the crown of Trini’s head.

Anyway.

..

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title from "Sugar River" by Matt Pond PA.


	3. we waste time we'll never get back

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> finally was okay enough with the (fifth or sixth) edit of this to post it.
> 
> as always, thank you to everyone who's taken the time to give me feedback. you're all amazing.

..

School is an interesting affair the next morning. Kimberly holds her hand again on the way to class, but this time people look. People whisper. High schoolers, Trini thinks, have never approved of her, which is fine, as she’s never approved of them either.

The past year or so of her life, you could argue, has been so profoundly rocked by chance, by happenstance. She’s stumbled into all she owns. Here is something else that astounds her:

Kimberly Hart carrying Trini’s books for her, standing outside her first class, and ignoring everyone else around them staring, gaping. “See you after?” is the question she is asked and Trini smiles, beyond herself, when Kimberly kisses her right cheek once -- short and firm -- and then turns on her heel to make her way down the hall, throwing a smile and a wave at Trini when she catches her still standing there, staring. Gaping.

But then --

“I think what you guys are doing is really brave,” a girl in her first period says when she leaves Kimberly at the door and moves to her desk.

Trini pauses, shrugging off her backpack and unzipping it, resting it on her hard, plastic seat so that she can pull out her binder, her notebook, her pens. She does not break eye contact with this girl. They’ve spoken, perhaps, once. On the first day of school when the teacher had made them get to know the student next to them and introduce them to the class.

Her name is Aisha. She used to help with the school radio station before budget cuts shut it down. That’s the depth of Trini’s knowledge about her.

For a moment, she is terrified that she’s been too obvious. That everyone knows how she feels, how she’s been feeling, and that Kimberly is just marrying her out of pity.

“What? Going to class?” she asks, feeling the snark of the words bubble up in her throat. She sets her backpack in the basket under her desk and sits down.

Aisha looks stuck. She frowns, then twitches a smile at Trini. “Um, no. I meant about the --”

“I know what you meant,” Trini cuts in, flicking her eyes up to the board.

The room is filling up now with the rest of the class and she can feel some of them looking at her, see others of them edging carefully around Aisha’s desk as if they’d been listening.

“O-oh. Okay.”

She sounds hurt, and that’s why Trini looks over at her, ignoring the other students around them. It’s possible she hadn’t meant it the way it came out -- as if marrying another girl was something to be considered _brave_ or that it _is_ brave, it has to be -- so Trini flickers a smile at her then turns away.

“Thanks,” she says, thinking of Kimberly at the party last night and how she’d looked in the streetlamps outside of Trini’s house when she’d dropped her off -- her lips parted, eyes dark as she’d said, _That was interesting,_ like it meant something else.

Or was supposed to.

Aisha coughs. “You’re welcome,” she squeaks and then the bell rings.

.

At lunch, it’s more of the same.

“I’ve had ten people congratulate me in the last hour,” Kimberly says as she sets her tray besides Trini’s, across from Billy.

Jason gives her a rueful smile. “I keep getting apologies, if it makes you feel any better.”

Something twists in Trini’s gut as she looks between the two of them. Their tiny family hadn’t been the only ones to assume that Jason and Kimberly would find their way to each other then, and the thought of someone else looking at them and _wondering --_ knowing what she’d been sure she’d known before it tapered off -- leaves her aching.

Kimberly brushes a hand against her knee under the table, fingers light on the fabric of her jeans.

“I’m so happy for you guys,” Billy tells them, spooning at his pudding.

He’s smiling. A nice change of pace from the constant sense of foreboding that’s been ruining their time together.

She wonders what they think when look at them -- if Jason notes the way Kimberly always turns to Trini, eyes blazing, whenever she’s thought of something witty or funny to share. If Billy sees it, too, and wonders at when it arrived.

Or maybe Billy looks at them and believes that, maybe, that’ve been together the entire time -- since that first night at the quarry, running together and then the _train_ \--

Zack’s thoughts, she knows, are probably more gutter-based. He’d looked at them across Billy’s living room last night when her and Kimberly had been making their exit and wiggled his eyebrows, God help her. Whatever Zack’s thinking is always so lavishly discernable.

“You okay?” Kimberly asks, her voice soft, palm softer. She squeezes Trini’s knee.

The boys are looking at her curiously. She’s glad, for once, that Zack has apparently skipped school again today. One less pair of confused eyes turned her way.

“I’m fine,” she swallows, turning her attention to the half-frozen greasy patty the cafeteria calls a burger.

Kimberly doesn’t seem to believe her and that’s okay for now. She doesn’t want to waste any time they have left complaining about how none of this is _real_.

.

When Trini wakes, she’s alone, the evening light bleeding lucent oranges and pinks through the window blinds, spreading up the ceiling above her.

She clenches her fingers into the curl of Zack’s sheets, bunched up underneath her knees and looks around at her dusk-drenched bedroom. Pushing herself upright, she lands her weight too hard on her palms, rolling onto the scrapes there from sparring too rough with Zack earlier. She winces.

Kimberly is somewhere else. She’d said, _I have a thing, call you later?,_ and pressed a kiss to Trini’s cheek and then trotted off against the late spring sun to where her car was parked, hidden from view, in the quarry. Jason and Billy had been talking softly to each other behind them and Zack had come up behind her, slung an arm around her shoulders and said, _Been a while, huh?_

And, even though it _hadn’t_

( they see each other every day )

she’d followed him back to his trailer, spoken briefly with his mother and him, and then promptly fallen asleep with him on his tiny pull out bed in the main section of the trailer.

It was nice, of course. Zack is warm and strong and he holds her the right way -- close to how Kimberly does, but not quite (less forcefully than Jason, who likely thinks he’ll be alone the moment he lets go -- the downside to all of them falling asleep on their various living room floors on Saturday evenings is never knowing who you’ll latch onto in your sleep) -- and it’s getting dark outside.

Whatever peace had settled into her veins begins to trickle away, replaced with that abyssal gloom from before.

It’s deep in her chest. Flooding. Harsh.

She has three text messages, all from Kimberly.

All gibberish.

_june 1st @ 4._

Then, _june 3rd @ 3,_ then, right below, _june 3rd @ 5:15._

Trini frowns, confused and then begins to type, _What?_

Because the messages were sent at least an hour ago and no other explanation has come. She stops before sending it, watching as the three little bubbles appear on Kimberly’s side of the conversation.

 _more for self reference. sorry. explain ltr,_ she says, _you home?_

There aren’t any lights on, but she can hear the mumblings of the TV in Mrs. Taylor’s room and knows that it’s dinner time for her -- that she usually has old sitcom reruns on while she sits, propped up, to eat. She’s been doing better lately, her new medication helping her sit up longer, hold the TV remote herself. Zack’s been so proud.

Trini doesn’t want to think about it.

 _Not yet,_ she says. _At Zack’s._

Kimberly must have the message open already, waiting for a response. _Read at 6:52 PM_ appears right under it immediately.

  1. _let me know when you get home pls_



And that’s it. Then the blinking ellipses appear again, followed by the kissing emoji.

Trini’s face flushes hotly.

She pushes herself to her feet, tucking her phone into her back pocket and grabbing her sweater off the chair by Zack’s bed, kicking her shoes back on without tying them. Zack is sitting on his front steps, rolling a cigarette between his fingers and looking, by all rights, like the most pensive teenage boy she’s ever seen.

“Leaving?” he asks, but he doesn't sound hurt, just curious. He cranes his neck to look at her, standing on that top step by the door and holding her sweater in her hands.

“Yeah,” she says. “Thanks for --”

She always wants to thank him for this. For the escape. How he always lets her come over here when she can’t sleep and Kimberly can’t come in the middle of the night -- how his house is a retreat for her from her family.

He grins. “No worries, babe.”

She loves him. Desperately. Loves all of them so much. That emptiness, looming in her chest, twists as he smiles at her. She doesn’t want to watch him die.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says, swallowing around the lump in her throat so that she can get it out properly.

“As always. Goodnight, Trin,” Zack says and she presses a quick, blink-and-you-missed-it kiss to the crown of his head and then darts past him before he can yell out after her.

.

Her mother doesn’t even ask where she’s been, but she does invite her to sit down for the dinner she barges into. Her brothers grin cheekily at her from their side of the table and her dad watches her and blinks.

It might be the end of the world. Something big is coming.

So she says, “Um, sure,” and sits down. When she texts Kimberly, it’s under the table, hand hidden from view as she listens to her brothers relay their day to her in enormous detail.

.

Here is Kimberly Hart, sitting cross-legged on Trini’s bed when she finally gets upstairs thirty minutes later: Trini’s backpack is beside her where Trini dumped it before heading to the quarry after school, and she smiles as Trini enters.

She sits on the bed like she was born to do so. She was, maybe: she’s always believed in destiny, after all. It’s hard not too when you’re chosen to save the universe with four other nobodies in some podunk, middle-of-nowhere town.

She says, “Took you long enough. I’ve been up here for ages.”

Trini jumps on instinct. Superpowers or not, she just hadn’t expected to walk into her bedroom to find a pretty girl -- her _fiancée_ \-- sitting on her bed. Yet, here she is.

“I told you,” she starts, “my mom trapped me at dinner before I could stop her.”

A likely story. Not true at all -- she’d chosen to sit down -- but Kimberly doesn’t question it.

“Actually,” Kimberly says, pushing herself up to her knees and gesturing for Trini to cross the room until she does, “you said, ‘Dinner ehh my family be fine soon.’”

Trini stops a foot or so away, just enough to keep her sanity, but then Kimberly draws her arms up to circle around her neck and tug her closer and her breath catches in the high of her throat. “I was typing one-handed,” she explains.

“Right,” Kimberly returns, smirking.

“I didn’t proofread it.”

“That was pretty obvious.”

Trini sighs. “You’re the worst.” She starts to pull away, but Kimberly tightens her hold, smirk slipping away, so she stays. “You’re one to talk, though. What was with that crap you sent me earlier?”

Kimberly smiles at her. She says, gently, gently, “Those were the soonest ceremony times the courthouse has,” she tells her, then bites her lip, as if ashamed of what she’s said. Or nervous, perhaps.

It’s difficult to read her in the moment because Trini’s heart is pounding so deeply, warmth blooming up her neck under Kimberly’s delicate wrist.

“Oh,” she hears herself say.

More than that: Kimberly in the dim lighting of her bedroom -- just the one lamp on her bedside table -- and the dark of the sky behind her half-open blinds. Kimberly breathing so closely that she can feel the edge of her breath on her chin. It would be no trouble on her part, she knows, to tilt herself across that distance and press their lips together. Under normal engagement circumstances, this would be allowed.

Here, however --

She just doesn’t _know_. But enough of her is uncertain that she settles for not moving at all, barely even breathing.

“We can apply for the license online,” she explains. “But we both have to go pick it up in person. And I didn’t have your birth certificate or anything so I couldn’t do it for us.” She pauses, adjusts her arms around Trini’s shoulders and Trini scoots forward a little when she feels fingertips playing with her hair. “I think the lady at the clerk’s office was getting annoyed with all my questions.”

Trini laughs, feels it bubble somewhere warm, and Kimberly cracks another smile.

( Much earlier, this had been too much. It had been far too much, much too soon, to sit across a table from Kimberly Hart and smile and smile and pretend that her heart wasn’t getting away from her. It was too much to be this close and never quite --

But here they are. )

“Are you sure you wanna marry me?” she asks, hears the tremble in her voice, but she doesn’t try to hide it, or clear it, or make it seem like anything less than what it is.

Kimberly stares at her for a long moment, some mix of emotions that Trini can’t quite read in the deep brown there and Trini feels on display, feels how fish must feel in aquariums, how she’s always felt on the first day at a new school when the teacher says, _Class, we have a new student_.

There’s isn’t a yes. There isn’t a no. It’s possible neither answer is good enough.

Kimberly says, “Where’s your laptop?”

.

This is what it is to have a fiancée:

Sitting on her bed at nine o’clock on a school night, filing online for a marriage license with Kimberly Hart.

It’s holding hands because there’s no reason _not_ to after sneaking down the hallway to the safe her parents’ keep in the den to get her Social Security card, her birth certificate.

It’s Kimberly laughing and saying, “That’s some sincere sleuthing. I’d call you Pink Panther, but --” and then pressing a kiss to the side of Trini’s jaw when she grumbles about the joke.

It’s something. It’s everything.

It’s nothing she’d expected.

.

Scuffing her sneakers against the dirty linoleum, Trini briefly considers dropping Kimberly’s hand for the nineteenth time in the fifteen minutes they’ve been sitting here. It feels like everyone is watching them, all of them knowing what’s going on -- that they’re too young for this, that it’s stupid, that Kimberly is too good for her anyway or maybe that she’s just doing it to be kind or _something_.

( They’ll need to discuss this, she’s sure, but it’s getting to the point where the words can’t make it out past that dense emptiness in her chest )

Her hand is clammy. She wants to let go of Kimberly’s fingers and wipe them against her jeans, but she doesn’t want to call attention to the fact that they’re clammy in the first place. So she leaves it.

“I’m on your shoes,” comes Kimberly’s voice, melodic and happy. When Trini looks at her, she’s glancing down at Trini’s feet, the gray fabric peppered with white dinosaur silhouettes, eyes zeroed in on the tiny curved pterodactyl.

“So are Jason and Billy,” Trini returns. “You’re not special.”

A peal of laughter comes bursting from Kimberly’s mouth, even though it’s not particularly funny. The woman in the desk on the other side of the room looks at them scoldingly. Kimberly stifles herself immediately, free hand clamped over her own mouth, and then she turns back to Trini.

“You aren’t on them,” she points out. “Neither is Zack. Does that mean you _are_ special?”

Trini smiles, feels the warmth of Kimberly’s palm pressed hot into her own. “Sabre-tooths and mastodons are mammals,” she says. “All dinosaurs were reptiles. My shoes only have dinosaurs on them.”

There’s not a chance for Kimberly to counter-argue -- to say _of course_ they’re mammals, that’s not _news_ \-- because Beatrice Joseph comes clicking in her heels back to her desk from whatever filing room she’d been in. Trini was fairly certain that the whole point of “filing online” was to streamline the process, and yet --

Beatrice Joseph has a manila envelope in her hands and she pulls out an official looking piece of paper and holds it up to look at it, eyes darting between what’s written there and Trini and Kimbery’s I.D.’s on her desk.

“Here you are,” she says finally, sliding the document into the envelope and then holding it out.

Kimberly reaches out and grabs for it, letting go of Trini’s hand in the process. “Thank you.”

Beatrice Joseph -- probably fifty-years-old -- smiles at these teenage girls sitting at her desk and says, “You’re welcome. You girls have a wonderful day.”

Trini smiles at her, thanks her silently and then they’re getting to their feet and heading off back through the labyrinth of the county office.

“Congratulations!” Beatrice Joseph shouts at them when they’re half-out of the room.

Trini smiles, looks at Kimberly Hart holding their marriage license in her hands like it’s some kind of rare artifact -- recently unearthed and not yet sold to some museum somewhere -- and the smile she sends back, the little half-wave, is anything but insincere.

.

“Do your parents know?”

Trini asks it in Kimberly’s car because it seems easier, somehow. Like the smaller space and lack of required eye contact will make the odds that much better. Kimberly is driving and Trini isn’t looking at her, but she can feel the way she stiffens, the way the question lingers between them in the cool, air-conditioned interior of her car.

She sniffs, clears her throat. “Yeah,” she says. “They know.”

Surprising, maybe, but not as surprising as she’d maybe anticipated. It would have been a far worse shock, she thinks, had the answer been _no._

“Oh,” she hears herself whisper.

Her next question goes unasked, but doesn’t remain unanswered long.

“They’re fine with it, by the way,” Kimberly says. “They...they found out the other day and I...Sorry I didn’t tell you.”

But --

“They’re _fine_ with it?”

“Sure. Why is that hard to believe?”

“They’re just completely A-okay with their eighteen-year-old daughter marrying another girl?”

Kimberly hesitates. “I’m an adult, Trini. I don’t need their permission.”

But their support is nice, Trini imagines. Her arms are crossed over her stomach and her fingers toy with the polyester of her seat belt. Her house is less than two minutes away. Later tonight, the boys will descend upon the Hart household en masse and Trini will be there, too. They haven’t spent more than an hour in that pit all week. There hardly seems to be a point anymore -- with this _feeling_ coming down around their ears and suffocating them -- and that’s left a lot of spare time to fill, to distract themselves.

But, before that, she’s facing at least three hours alone in her house, up against the united front that is her parents. They need to know. She understands that, logically. Somewhere in the back of her brain, but she’s right on the cusp of asking Kimberly to come in with her, to not leave her alone.

You get married to have someone at your side for moments like these, and she’s going into the trenches alone, once more.

The only thing that keeps her from the question is the understanding that Kimberly won’t hesitate to say yes.

“My dad said something about life experience and, ‘Us controlling her life is what got her into trouble last time, Maddy,’,” Kimberly says quietly when she pulls up outside Trini’s house, sliding her car into park. “When I was upstairs. I think he thought I couldn’t hear. My mom wasn’t...wasn’t too happy at first. I think --”

And for all her breadth of knowledge when it comes to this girl, Trini has no idea what it is that Kimberly thinks just then, and Kimberly doesn’t bother to finish the thought, anyway. When she unbuckles, goes to grab her backpack from between her knees, she’s forced to finally make eye contact. Kimberly’s eyes are soft, her mouth set into a pretty, serious line. Trini imagines kissing it into a smile but doesn’t move closer, or make any effort to do so. She tightens her grip on her backpack strap.

“I’m gonna tell my mom,” she confesses.

“Tonight?” Kimberly’s voice is full of concern. Her hand moves from the gear shift towards Trini’s own, covering it warmly on Trini’s knee.

“Yeah.” Trini sniffles. “It’s whatever. I’ll see you at seven?”

It’s a question, but she doesn’t stick around to hear the answer.

.

Here is the short version: June does not take it well.

Shorter yet: she’d heard already.

News has a funny way of traveling around a small town, especially something as scandalous as two high schoolers tying the knot. The day after Jason’s party, it had seemed like the entire school had gained overnight access to some kind of special news bulletin that Trini must have missed. It’s in the same way, it would seem, that the same news has reached her mother.

There are a lot of possibilities:

The mother of one of her peers stopping June in the bread aisle of the grocery store, saying, _Oh, I’ve just heard!_ or something to that effect.

June overhearing the conversation the night before, when her and Kimberly had been pressed side-by-side in her bed, filling out all that information for their marriage license.

Or, perhaps, mothers’ intuition. There is little that cannot be chalked up to the simple understanding that comes from raising your child for this long. It’s possible she knew from the start.

The worst part of the whole thing is that Trini has no clue what the truth is -- how her mother came to know, or what happened in between.

Instead, she is called into the kitchen from helping her brothers set the table for dinner. Her dad is in the living room with his feet kicked up on the coffee table, no wife nearby to scold him for such an act, to tell him to put subtitles on for the game, rather than turning the volume all the way up so everyone in the house can hear the score.

June stands silhouetted against the light coming in from the window as she pulls the final dish from the oven. Her voice had been clipped, short, as she’d said, “Trini, can you come here for a moment?”

And then --

“What’s up?” Trini asks, popping the final sound, trying to sound detached and chipper.

He heart is thudding so loudly in her chest that she’s half-certain her mother can hear it.

“I...Is there something you wanted to tell me?” She tilts her head as she asks, swinging around to look at her daughter and Trini freezes.

Her mouth is far too dry to make a sound, so she settles for gripping the edge of the countertop and trying not to let her legs jelly out from under her.

June looks away. “I...I hope you don’t think I actually intend to let you marry that girl.”

_That girl._

For months, Kimberly has been the only friend that her mother hasn’t disapproved of entirely. Kimberly is punctual when she’s invited to dinner and she helps clear the table and she tutored Trini in A.P. Government last semester before midterms. She says _please_ and _thank you_ and has never once tried to call her parents by their first names even when they’d insisted.

And now she’s _that girl._

“I --” She’s already choked the vowel out when she realizes she doesn’t really have an argument. There’s no point in denying the truth. Her mother has always been able to see right through her anyway.

“You’re eighteen, Trinidad, and...to think that I could have raised you to think that going behind my back like _this_ was okay, that you --”

Trini frowns, bites her lip to keep from crying. Her brothers are chattering away in the dining room still and her dad is groaning about his team in the living room and it’s a normal night. It was _supposed_ to be. She was going to tell her parents on her own and it was going to go okay.

Kimberly’s parents were fine. She wants to argue that. Wants to say, _They’re supportive, they always are, why can’t you, why can’t you be like them_ , but there’s a tightness in her throat that keeps her from breathing properly anyway.

More than that:

 _It doesn’t matter! None of it does. Can’t you feel it? Can’t you feel what’s coming? I could feel it before, even when I didn’t-- Even before the mine, before my friends or the spaceship-- I felt it coming and I’m sure you do, too, Mom. None of this matters! She’s just trying to help. She’s always trying to help and she_ **_is_ ** _and I won’t--_

“I forbid you --” her mother starts, but Trini can’t --

She --

She’s not sure why she makes the choice she does.

( Later, she’ll be certain she was thinking only of Kimberly holding her hand in the county office earlier, that official-looking slip of paper with their names typed out --

 **_Kimberly Ann Hart_ ** _and_ **_Trinidad Lucia Ortiz-Kwan_ ** **\--**

side-by-side like that or some sad combination of _both_ )

Either way, it’s her that says, “You can’t forbid me, Mom. We’re getting married either way. I’ll get my things. You don’t have to worry about me taking up space or.... _going behind your back_ again. No worries.”

And her mother, reeling around, had begun to say: “Trinidad, I am _not_ kicking you out of my home, I just want to --”

But Trini had already been too far away to hear her, to understand that running isn’t always the best option even while it’s usually the easiest. She’d been storming through the dining room (ignoring her brothers’ confused looks), past where her dad was lounging (and he’d looked up, he’d said, “Trini, what--?” but, still, she hadn’t stopped). She’d been up in her room with the door shut, shoving her clothes into a duffel bag and then chucking it and her backpack out the window.

If she hadn’t been out the window, too, she might have heard her mother coming after her, footsteps hurried on the stairs as she called out for her daughter, but --

Well. She had been. That’s all there is to it.

..

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from "Until the Light" by Lights.
> 
> all my info about marriage licenses and stuff comes from the Mighty Google. obviously filing for it and getting it printed and whatnot comes before you actually get married (which we’ll get to, but not yet). sorry for any inaccuracies.


	4. oh, this love would kill me (but i don't think i mind)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you guys are all seriously so kind for leaving me your thoughts. it's always vastly appreciated. i'm trying to respond to you, but i am, regrettably, very lazy (and also currently out of state and using not-my-laptop to post this in the first place -- thank God for Google Drive) and apathetic. so we shall see.
> 
> anyway, here you go. hope you enjoy!

..

In any event, you must keep moving forward: always, always.

“Can I stay with you?” says Trini, and she’s standing on Kimberly’s front porch, her hands weighed down by her bags and Kimberly is standing there in the doorway looking the most shell-shocked Trini has ever seen her. The whole thing is sort of ridiculous, but what else is there left for them to be? If this thing comes, she’s certain it won’t matter anyway. What’s a few days or weeks or hours between friends?

Or--

_fiancées._

And so Kimberly lets her into her home, just like she always has before. 

They stand there in the entryway together, the door shut safely behind them, and Kimberly shifts her weight and fidgets like she can't quite decide what she should be doing with her hands.

“Your mom,” she starts, “did she…?”

She trails off, as if she can’t even consider what Trini’s mom might have just done.

But, no. She hadn’t. Not really. Ironic, really, that Trini had been the one to kick herself out of her home, preemptively.

“I didn’t give her the chance,” is what she says.

And, well, yeah --

That’s exactly what she’d done.

.

( Kimberly holds her tight in her bed as the late afternoon bleeds into evening. She speaks softly, with gentle fingers moving through Trini's hair, saying things like, "It's okay," which feels shockingly untrue, and, "I've got you," which feels substantially more correct. She only gets up when the front door opens, creaking her way quietly down the steps because she thinks Trini's asleep, and then she says something like, “Trini, she -- ” to her parents downstairs. Trini tries not to listen. She presses Kimberly’s pillow over her face and tries to focus on her own breathing instead; that ragged in and out that lets her know she’s still blessedly -- regrettably -- alive. )

.

Later still:

She wakes to the heat of four other bodies in adjacency. Her head is pillowed on something soft that’s moving. Someone’s stomach. There’s noise too -- voices and some sort of machine gun in the distance. The stomach laughs, bouncing her head up.

It’s Kimberly’s stomach, of course, and she must have had her hand in Trini’s hair because it drops slowly as Trini sits up, looks around.

Zack is on her other side, a bowl of popcorn in his lap. Jason is pressed on the very edge of the bed beside him, hanging half-off the edge. Billy is on the foot of the bed, watching the superhero movie they’ve got playing on Kimberly’s TV, nestled on the bookshelf across from her bed and almost too small to see properly without squinting.

“You’re up,” Zack says and when Trini looks at him, and then yawns, he stuffs some popcorn in her open mouth, making her cough in surprise and nearly choke.

“Please don’t kill my fiancée,” comes Kimberly’s drawl. Her warm arm comes to wrap around Trini’s shoulders and Trini turns to her, chewing on the popcorn in her mouth and trying not to cough again. “How are you feeling?” she asks, the look on her face, the way she trails her fingers down Trini’s arm too intimate to be done in a bed currently being shared with three teenage boys.

“Fine,” Trini grumbles. She sits back against the headboard with Kimberly’s arm still around her and stretches out, pressing her feet into Billy’s legs until he turns and smiles at her, waves with a Twizzler hanging out of his mouth.

“That’s still weird to think about,” Zack says. "Like...you guys are getting married."

He says it slack-jawed, like he still can't believe it, and Trini wants to say that she knows the feeling -- she can hardly believe that she's become so lucky at the same time she's become  _unlucky_ \-- but she can't find the words.

“I’m sure it’s weird for you to _think_ in general,” Jason teases and Zack elbows him.

Jason elbows back and it’s right on the verge of turning into an all-out scuffle before Billy says, “I’m trying to watch the movie. Could you please get along?” and they stop immediately.

"Sorry, Billy," Zack says and Jason mumbles the same phrase, quieter -- more ashamed, perhaps.

She appreciates the diversion, at least, and wonders if Jason had done it on purpose. There's no doubt that Kimberly had told them what happened with her mom -- what little she knows, at least. It's possible that Jason is trying to keep the mood light, the air clean of anything that could be labelled as 'regret'.

Quiet for a moment, then Zack yawns, too. “I never got a definitive answer on strippers,” he says and Kimberly’s fingers stop making circles on Trini’s upper arm so they can pinch him on the shoulder, making him yelp. She returns to her circle-making like nothing has just happened.

Anyway.

“I have a surprise for you later,” Kimberly whispers eventually, into the soft of Trini’s beanie. The press of her lips lingers for a moment.

Trini isn’t sure what to say to that and anyway, the sun is down now, the crickets chirping outside quietly. They have detention early tomorrow morning -- the last before graduation -- and it’s nice, to be here like this. Like nothing has changed and nothing will.

Jason reaches out -- ever the leader -- across Zack and touches her wrist with the barest of reassuring contact before stealing the popcorn bowl and returning to the movie like nothing happened. Billy pushes his legs into her feet, tapping out a rhythm just between them and Zack leans his head over on top of hers.

“Okay,” she says, only a little forced. It’s easier to say than, _Thank you,_ but she means that, too, all the same.

.

The boys leave late, trailing from Kimberly’s room one-by-one and back down to Jason’s truck, waiting to take them home. Ordinarily, Trini would be going with them, to be dropped off last, just two blocks away from Jason’s house. Tonight, however, she stays on Kimberly’s bed, pretending to be busy fiddling with her phone while Kimberly flits around her room, looking nervous.

Finally, she stands at the foot of the bed and Trini looks up at her, frowns.

“You okay?” she asks and Kimberly smiles, briefly. It flickers off her face in an instant.

“I’m fine. Wanna come with me?”

“You’re not going to kill me, right?” she teases, but she’s already swinging her feet to the side of the bed, tugging her sneakers back on without tying them all the way and pushing herself to her feet.

Kimberly laughs nervously. “Not yet.”

Her hand is warm, fingers soft as they entwine with Trini’s and Trini lets herself be led out into the dark hallway, down the stairs, and out the back door.

It’s midnight and she’s standing with Kimberly, holding hands out on her back lawn, being tugged over to the driveway towards the garage.

“What’s my surprise, then?” Trini asks. “Cause, I hate to break it to you, princess, but I _have_ seen the stars before.”

Normally, Kimberly would laugh, but she doesn’t now. Instead, she keeps moving until they come to a stop in the middle of the pavement of the driveway, looking up at the garage. Kimberly lets go of her hand.

“Seriously,” Trini tries. “What’s going on?”

Kimberly stands in front of her, smiles, and then shakes her head. “Just close your eyes, okay?”

She’d do anything for Kimberly. She really would. It's been quite the learning curve over the past year, but she's learning to cope with it. So Trini closes her eyes.

Footsteps move away from her, towards the little door on the side of the garage, it sounds like and then the door opens. Seconds pass and then, from behind the darkness of her eyelids, there’s a sudden burst light. Multiple lights that appear in an instant. Somehow, she keeps her eyes closed.

The door opens again and her heart speeds up because Kimberly is standing right in front of her again, fingers trailing gently across the backs of Trini’s hands and she whispers, “You can open them now.”

And so she does.

The garage is behind Kimberly’s head, lit up with multi-colored Christmas lights all the way up to the second story -- the one that her parents have been spending all spring renovating. It’s sloppy work, done too quickly and without any particular method. There are a lot of them, spread out on the edges of the garage doors and then up to the windows on the top floor where that empty loft used to be, bursting white and blue and pink and yellow. It hurts her eyes.

“Little early to decorate for Christmas,” Trini says and Kimberly’s laugh draws her eyes back to the girl in front of her. “What’s going on?”

Kimberly’s hands are on Trini’s hips, light and warm, and she looks over her shoulder at her handiwork. “The boys helped me,” she says. “While you were sleeping. It...Have you ever put Christmas lights up? It’s really hard.”

She pouts a little and Trini bites her lip, anxious and jittery with apprehension.

“I…” Kimberly starts again, “I bought it from my parents earlier. It’s ours.”

But --

“The _garage_?”

Kimberly laughs again. “Actually, the apartment _above_ the garage.”

Trini frowns.

“It’s not a house, but I still figured, you could cross something else off that list you made. And, actually, with the lights...that one, too.”

And the thing is, Trini sort of wants to cry, but she doesn’t do that sort of thing. Mostly because no one has exactly done _this_ kind of thing for her. She coughs, clears her throat, trying to keep herself from actually crying.

She says, “How much did you pay for it?” mostly out of curiosity.

“Let’s just say the payment process was more...ceremonial than anything.”

It’s the nicest thing anyone has ever done for her and Kimberly has been doing this nonstop in the past week and a half. No one has ever _tried_ and her hands are still on Trini’s hips and they’re getting _married_ . They’re going to live above Kimberly’s parents’ garage for as long as they’re able to make it, _married_ \-- and she’s happy, and that’s the most ironic thing in the entire world but she doesn’t have enough air to voice that thought.

They’re just sort of staring at each other and she doesn’t even realize she’s doing it when she leans closer. Kimberly’s breath stutters at her forehead. It smells like candy. She imagines humid summer mornings stretched out across a bed with this girl, the sun drifting like clouds over the sun through the window, painting stripes across their legs and arms and Kimberly’s lips tasting like the same warm breeze that’s brushing through the trees and the grass outside.

Kimberly moves one of her hands from Trini’s hip and slides it into the dip of her back. It’s slow and careful, tentative as she squeezes her stationary palm over Trini’s hip. Trini shifts forward, as the motion asks her too, but she trips a little and ends up too close. But Kimberly doesn’t loosen her hold enough that she can step back, so she remains. Her heart is thudding, jumping against her ribcage, and her hands are shaking so she eases them up Kimberly’s shoulders to rest there, flat and waiting.

A signal to keep moving, perhaps, because Kimberly drops her head the barest amount so that their noses brush, so that their breath stutters together.

“Trin --” Kimberly starts, but she stops partway through it, has to swallow. Stops.

Trini’s shaking. She’s sure of it. “This is the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me,” she hears herself say and she’s not sure if she’s talking about the apartment, the Christmas lights, or the entire engagement in general. Some mix of all of it, perhaps. She wants to close her eyes, to shut out the vulnerability of a confession like that, but it’s like she can’t look away from Kimberly.

“I’d do anything for you, Trini,” Kimberly says and her voice is softer than Trini’s ever heard it before. “You’d think you’d have noticed that by now.”

Trini takes a deep breath that stops, shakes, somewhere during the inhale. “I know the feeling.”

The Christmas lights shine a halo-glow down on the crown of Kimberly’s messy hair and Trini curls the fingers of her right hand into the ends. Her fingertips brush against the nape of Kimberly’s neck and she watches, enraptured by the sight of Kimberly closing her eyes for a moment and letting out a small sigh.

Her eyes open back up after a moment and it’s as if they’re closer now than they had been before.

“You have to want this, too,” Kimberly whispers into what little space lingers between them. “You have to meet me in the middle. It won’t mean anything if you don’t.”

And she’s right. Of course she is. Trini knows it, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t shaking.

Either way: Kimberly leans down and she leans up and their lips finally meet.

It’s slow. Or --

Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s fast or maybe it’s normal-paced or maybe it’s the world around them that slows down, instead. Because, the thing is, she’s been imagining kissing Kimberly for so long that it’s almost -- for the first initial seconds -- like she’s imagining it again. And then, of course, Kimberly pulls her closer by her hips and parts her lips, tilts her head just so and--

 _Fuck_ , she’s not imagining this at all, is she?

Because in her fantasies, nothing she ever did could provoke the noise that Kimberly makes in the back of her throat when Trini kisses her back, harder. Her fingers tangle further into the taller girl’s hair and there’s no space to close between them anymore, but they just keep pulling, keep shifting -- tugging achingly, bruisingly.

It’s quiet and it’s starting to get cold and Kimberly’s house is hidden in the winding mountain roads outside of town. The driveway is long and leads out to one of those back roads that even Google Maps can’t find half the time. And normally, it’s a little frightening to be out here in the middle of the night like this -- the distance from town and any sort of civilization making the whole thing feel very _scream-all-you-want_ \-- but tonight, the crickets are chirping and the sky is clear of clouds, the moon big and bright, and Kimberly Hart is kissing her.

She tries to breathe in through her nose, running out of air, and ends up catching Kimberly’s top lip between her teeth without meaning to. Kimberly groans again and then Trini finally pulls away, closing her eyes for a moment, because being forced to make eye contact that soon after having had her tongue in Kimberly’s mouth feels like a tad more than she can handle.

“Holy shit,” she hears Kimberly breathe after a moment, and she finally opens her eyes. “You have no idea how much I wish I’d just done that back in September.” Her pupils are blown and Trini nearly laughs at the sight.

Instead, she smiles, rolls her eyes, and says, “Try me.”

.

They sleep in Kimberly’s old bed that night.

Or, rather, Trini does. Alone.

Kimberly makes a makeshift bed out of blankets from her closet on the floor beside the bed and, when Trini looks at her confusedly, says something about, ‘keeping things clean’ before the actual wedding. A joke, perhaps.

But--

Maybe not.

When she can’t sleep -- thinking of her mother across town, her brothers, her father -- Kimberly is close enough to reach up and grab hold of her hand. And, for now, she lets it be enough.

.

This is what she dreams:

She’s sitting in the room they use for detention -- sitting at her desk towards the middle and someone is sitting behind her, in the corner. She can’t see them because she can’t turn her head, but there’s no one else in the room around her, but she knows she’s being watched.

And then, “I’m that feeling deep in your gut, Yellow. Haven’t you idiot children figured that out by now? I am the wind and the rain; the storm and the hammer; and I am that _lack_ in your heart where you think you feel love. I am your end, your beginning, I am --”

The voice sends a thrill through her. She can’t turn her head, but she knows that Rita is behind her. She knows, she _knows_ \--

There’s a flash of green light. She drops her pencil.

When she’s able to turn around, Rita is floating in the air, as if all the gravity has been sucked from the space around her.

“You’re not the source of me,” Trini spits.

And Rita has ice edging up her cheekbones, up the corners of her eyes to the corners of her mouth. Trini did that. She read once about what happens to humans in outer space without a spacesuit. She saw a simulated video. A little 3D man, pixelated and frozen. Her science teacher said something about the body shrinking into itself and then expanding rapidly and exploding, but the video hadn’t shown any of that.

Rita’s face is frozen and her mouth doesn’t move, but she says, “Yellow. What a fitting color for you. _Coward_ ,” all the same.

“Fuck off,” Trini says and then she wakes up.

.

“It was just a dream,” says Kimberly in the warm of the bed a moment later.

“I know that,” says Trini, with a perfectly schooled expression.

( She lets Kimberly hold her, press kisses to the top of her head, as though she had not been the one to wake her, to pull her into the bed after that nightmare anyway. )

.

“How’d you girls sleep?” Ted Hart asks over breakfast the next morning.

Trini’s hair hadn’t flattened out right before coming downstairs and they’d slept late -- there hadn’t been time for a shower to wet it down and correct it. Not a shower _and_ breakfast and detention has a tendency to drag on even longer the hungrier you are. So now she’s sitting at the kitchen table across from Kimberly’s parents with her beanie pulled over her head, cocked to the side a little. “Perfect, thanks,” she lies easily.

Kimberly munches down on a waffle, impossibly loud. She grins around cheeks like a chipmunk’s.

“Isn’t today the last day?” asks Maddy Hart, on Ted’s right side.

Her plate has been empty since Trini had first followed Kimberly into the kitchen in the first place and she’s just been glancing between the two of them for the past three minutes. It’s funny, too, that she doesn’t just come right out and say the word ‘detention’ -- as if it’s a curse word she doesn’t find appropriate for so early on a Saturday.

Trini’s mother--

Well, she used the word as a dig. Some stern reminder that her daughter was someone who’d done something bad enough to warrant detention every Saturday for the remainder of the school year. But Trini doesn’t want to think about that right now, so she doesn’t.

“Yep,” Kimberly manages, swallowing a gulp from her water glass and popping the ‘p’ at the end. “What are you guys doing today?”

Her parents are always so much more laid back than Trini’s and she wonders at it every meal she shares with them. Half of her is on edge, waiting for them to bring up how disappointed they are or that they won’t allow the wedding in the first place, but they don’t -- haven’t, yet; won’t, maybe.

“I have the air conditioning guy coming over to finish the air in the apartment,” Ted tells her. “Unless you lovebirds want to spend your honeymoon asphyxiating in the heat.”

Kimberly snorts.

Ted continues: “When _is_ the honeymoon, exactly? Last I heard, the wedding date was the third, but I haven’t heard anything else and I think at least two people at this table are graduating the next morning,” and he says each word like he just wanted to bring it up, just wanted to make eye contact with his daughter’s fiancée at breakfast before detention on a Saturday, rolling the syllables over and waiting.

Kimberly’s snort becomes a coughing laugh, and she nudges Trini with her elbow.

“Hm…” she starts, clearing her throat. “Getting married--” She lifts one hand up as if weighing it, then the other as she says, “--or graduating.” She drops her hands. “One of these things is not like the other.”

Now, even her mother is smiling. For all of Kimberly’s words about how she hadn’t initially been on board with the idea, she’s still laughing a little at her husband, at her daughter. She shares a commiserating look with Trini -- familial as she rolls her eyes, as if to say, _Why do we love these two?_

“Well, whichever gets you laid, right?” Ted jokes and Trini chokes on her water.

Kimberly pats her on the back, still laughing. “You said it.”

Throat clear, Trini makes a low, hard sound of surprise and Kimberly lifts an eyebrow at her, as if to ask, _You good?_

And she is. They kissed exactly three times last night and she woke with her head against Kimberly’s chest to the smell of bacon and waffles and now they’re holding hands under the table and her parents are making jokes because they support this whole thing, which is sort of nuts because --

Her mother hadn’t. Her mother had used the word _forbid_ and Trini had fled her own home, abandoned her brothers who didn’t know any better and this feeling in her chest is getting worse each morning.

It’s practically unbearable now.

The Harts, however, are made of looser stuff than her own family.

“Parental units,” Kimberly says, “permission to speak plainly?”

Maddy is already on her feet, gathering Trini’s empty plate, her own, her husband’s. She leaves Kimberly’s for the moment. “Permission granted, daughter,” she says, voice light as she crosses the tile floor and sets the plates into the sink, turning to lean against the counter.

“Thank you,” she starts, “for...I don’t know, for not trying to change my mind-- _our_ minds, I guess.” And Trini can barely see her entire face, but she knows exactly what expression is being pulled now: her jaw tight, teeth clenched, eyes blazing seriously in the early morning light.

“I just appreciate you guys,” Kimberly says. “So...thanks.”

“Kimmy, baby, we’re your parents,” Maddy says. She crosses back over to the table and reaches out, touches the top of her daughter’s head and then Trini’s. “We’re just glad you’re not dead set on marrying that Tyler boy. Trini is a lovely improvement.”

Kimberly laughs. Trini cringes, then mimes a smile back at Kimberly’s mom.

“Would trying to change your mind have worked?” Ted asks. He’s up now, too, filling his mug from the coffee pot again. He grins at his daughter. “For future reference.”

Trini wonders at his tone, so unlike her own mother's -- 

( _they don’t_ **_hate_ ** _you, Trini. They’re trying to be supportive. You should have seen my mom last night when I asked if you could stay with us. I think she was ready to drive over to talk to your mom in the middle of the night. And Dad helped me and the boys with the lights -- )_

_(They’re just being nice. I’m sure-- )_

_(They’re not just being nice, Trini. They like you. Do you know how many, ‘why can’t you be like your friend, Trini’ jokes I’ve been subjected to in the past year? Too many.)_

_(But -- )_

_(No buts. I’m hungry. Come on)_

\-- just yesterday. The ache of the memory throbs at the base of her skull, pulsing as she looks between Maddy and Ted’s smiling faces. It doesn’t seem real, that’s all.

“Probably not,” says Kimberly.

“Trini?” Ted asks, rolling his eyes at his daughter. “Would bribery have worked? I’m making notes somewhere.”

Trini laughs, lets it fill her chest and she smiles. Kimberly squeezes her hand under the table. “No,” she says. “Definitely not.”

“Darn,” he jokes, sipping at his coffee.

Silence.

Maddy starts the dishwasher across the kitchen.

Then, “Things were easier as a teenager, Mad. I think I miss it.”

Trini swallows, hard. Kimberly’s eyes are sad, now.

They’re thinking of the same thing -- how being a teenager has been anything _but_ easy this past year. It might get them killed before they’ve even had a chance to start.

Still, Kimberly doesn’t correct him. She fakes a laugh, pulls herself from the seat. “Yep. Summers off and no taxes,” she says. “Suck it.”

.

It’s almost bittersweet, that last day in detention. Trini finds herself aching at the thought that she’ll never sit in this room again. That Zack will never write her a note like he does on Saturdays, asking for her opinion or something or just teasing her. That Jason’s notes will no longer come by way too fast and he’ll have miscalculated the throw to begin with, hitting her in the face.

That she’ll never spend another Saturday morning staring longingly at the back of Kimberly’s head.

Four hours. Just like always.

She spends the majority of it looking down at her list, those last five things still written out, and then a folded note clips her right ear. She winces, cusses under her breath, and then opens it to see who’s handwriting it is.

Zack, of course.

When she turns to look at him, he’s frowning apologetically and mouthing, _Sorry!_

She flips him off.

_so did you and the bubblegum princess finally did the do_

The question -- if you can call it such without a question mark at the end -- makes her flush and she turns to him, looks at him pretending to be distracted by his own notebook so they can’t meet eyes. Turning back, she scribbles back a hasty, _it’s Princess Bubblegum,_ and then tosses it back to his head.

He unfolds it and then looks at her, rolls his eyes in a dramatic show. She flips him off again.

 _you know what i mean,_ is his next response.

It's his usual taunting. Nothing more, nothing less and exactly the kind of thing you'd expect from the older brother you never asked for or wanted. She frowns at the paper as she writes then throws it at him, aiming for the space between his eyes.

_I hate you so much._

It’s not true in the slightest, but it does the trick -- he pouts at her, jutting his bottom lip out comically and then scribbles, _whatever you love me._

And it’s true, so she leaves it be -- slides the note into her pocket and pillows her chin on her arms on her desk for the remainder of the time.

They’re dismissed twenty minutes later and Kimberly meets her, smiling like always, in the middle of the room. “Free at last, free at last,” she says and Trini laughs as Kimberly slides their hands together.

Jason and Billy are waiting by the stairs for them, looking just as nostalgic as Trini feels. And that’s how the five of them end their year-long detentions -- a week before graduation and trailing through the empty halls of the high school together.

Just like always.

.

The pit is exactly how they left it. Trini hasn’t been down there in days, but the ship -- Zordon and Alpha-5 especially -- have a funny way of making it feel like no time has passed at all. She’s not sure how to describe it.

For reasons she can’t fathom beyond simple habit, they’ve all been pretending like it’s just another day. Like they can’t feel whatever it is coming closer and closer with every passing hour. That whatever they’re going to have to face -- sooner, rather than later -- is going to be here soon.

Jason changes out of his wet clothes in the hall down the ship and Zack does the same in his little alcove. Billy hides out in one of the only whirling rooms that has a functional door that closes. Kimberly, for once, stays with her rather than giving her the proper privacy to change, herself. Small perks, perhaps, of feeling like this is a real engagement for the first time.

“You okay?” Kimberly asks standing there in the chill, harsh lighting of the spaceship in just her sports bra and a pair of running shorts.

Trini averts her eyes respectfully, listening to Alpha-5 whirring down the hall and Zack laughing at something Billy’s just said.  It takes boys so much less time to change. “Yeah,” she says, smiling. “Fine.”

As fine as she can be, perhaps.

After a moment, she says, “Is it weird I’ve kind of missed this?”

She’s half-in, half-out of her shirt and Kimberly is waiting for her when she finally pulls her head all the way through, staring at her with confusion.

“Missed what?” she asks. “Changing your clothes in a spaceship?”

Trini rolls her eyes. “No, just being here, I guess. Alpha-5? Zordon being super cryptic and stuff. Just feels like things are normal again. Like we were taking a break from real life or something.”

Their real life that might get them killed, but she doesn’t say that.

Kimberly stares at her silently for a moment, as if contemplating everything she’s just said and then she leans down and kisses the corner of Trini’s mouth. Gently. She pulls away. “Yeah, but a very nice break,” she’d said. “One where it became okay to do _that_.”

There’s a long pause and if Trini hadn’t woken up with her lips still tingling from the night before, she might be inclined to think she made the entire thing up. As it is, she didn’t. Kimberly kisses her nose and then pulls back completely.

“Why do you want to marry me, Kim?” she’s asking it before she can stop herself and Kimberly freezes in the middle of tugging a shirt on. They stare at each other for a moment Trini curses herself silently for finally, _finally,_ ruining things by saying it all aloud.

“What?” Her tone betrays her bewilderment and it’s like she tries to hide it by pulling her shirt the rest of the way on. “Where’s this coming from?”

Trini shrugs, crosses her arms, and looks away. Because, the thing is -- she doesn’t know. She’s been wondering it since this whole thing started, since that first night in her bedroom when Kimberly had offered her that ring and a whole slew of words that were anything but an explanation for _why_. But she hadn’t asked. She hadn’t really betrayed her own misgivings beyond that question the night they’d filed for the marriage license.

More silence. And then Trini feels Kimberly’s hands cupping the sides of her face, thumb trailing over her chin as her head is tilted upwards. Their eyes meet and Kimberly’s eyebrows are furrowed in that way they only get when she’s genuinely upset.

“Did I do something to make you feel like I don’t want this?”

And--

Not exactly what Trini had expected her to say.

“What?” she asks, then, “No, it’s not --”

But Kimberly barrels forward. “Because, I want this, Trini. I’m not...I’m not doing this as some kind of... _favor_ or because...I don’t know. I don’t do things I don’t want to. Whether we make it through this or not...I’m marrying you...I--”

And for a moment, Trini can practically hear the way that sentence is meant to end.

_\--love you._

She's beginning to understand that she probably knows the feeling. So she rocks forward onto her toes and kisses Kimberly, presses their lips together and closes her eyes and tries to understand that this -- somehow, miraculously, approaching death or not -- is something that's becoming hers.

Kimberly makes a noise that vibrates Trini’s teeth and pulls away after a second. “I’m not...I’m not forcing _you_ , am I?”

And Trini laughs. She doesn’t mean, too, but her mind -- _of course_ \-- brings up a memory of all those pamphlets her mom had slid across the table to her over the years, with _Consent is Sexy!_ written across them in bold-type.

She’d just never expected to have that sort of conversation regarding _getting married_.

Kimberly’s frowning again and Trini bites her lip to stop herself from laughing further, shakes her head and presses a kiss to the corner of the other’s girl’s mouth. “Of course not,” she says. “Of course you’re not forcing me.”

And they never really were the kind of friends that hugged outside of accidentally -- or _purposefully_ \-- falling asleep beside one another, but getting married changes things and Trini hugs Kimberly then. It’s a good height difference. Kimberly’s arms wrap around Trini’s middle, tugging her in, and she can just feel her exhale against her hair.

“Okay,” Kimberly says, sounding relieved. She coughs a little. “Good.”

The moment only continues for a moment or two longer. Somewhere deep inside the ship, Jason calls for them and Kimberly pulls away.

“Guess we should--” she starts, and Trini grips her wrist loosely. She smiles.

“Yeah,” Trini agrees. Then, “Let’s go kick Zack’s ass.”

It’s Kimberly that pulls her out of their little alcove, leading her down the hall, those stairs, to where the boys are waiting for them in the Pit. It’s Trini who follows her, like she always has, holding her hand the whole way.

.

An hour or so later, the five of them sweaty and bruised and tired, Jason grins at them and says, “Five more days,” in this _voice_ and he’s got a point.

The wedding date is coming by at a crazy speed. He has a cut right above his eyebrow that’s bleeding and Billy reaches out to wipe some of the blood away while Jason winces and leans into the fabric of the rag in Billy's hand.

“Oh, shit, yeah,” Zack says. He’d been inspecting a bruise on his shoulder from one of those putty sims and he looks up as this is said, eyes darting between Kimberly and Trini. “Last call for strippers. I have to throw that party _stat_.”

Kimberly is holding her hand, so Trini has to toss the rock at him left-handed. It misses him, but barely, and that seems to be answer enough for now either way.

.

It’s on their way out of the ship ( after ten minutes of Zordon saying all sorts of heavily ambiguous things like, “You must do what you must,” and, “Let your duty guide you,” -- which had made Zack snicker behind his fist ) that Apha-5 stops them.

He steps out from some weird corner, where he must have been waiting, unseen, to block their way. Kimberly jumps, reaching out an arm to hold back Trini, who says, “Fuck, dude! You can’t just scare people like that.”

Alpha-5’s eyes flicker off for a second, like a blink, and he looks as apologetic as an android can. “I always forget how jumpy you humans get,” he says. “I made something for you both out of the zirconium from your morphing terminals.”

He holds out one of his three-pronged hands and Trini frowns. “Uh... _what_?” she asks. “Where --”

“No,” Alpha-5 cuts her off. “There.” He shakes the hand and two thin, silver bands clink on one of his fingers.

Kimberly reaches out to grab them, holds them in her palm so that Trini can see. They’re nice, clean and Trini squints -- _are they glowing?_ She can’t be sure.

“Master Zack informed me of your impending nuptials and taught me a lot about human bonding ceremonies,” Alpha-5 tells them. “Please don’t cut any major arteries or veins during the blood sharing and drinking part.”

And--

The moment is effectively ruined. Trini takes in a deep breath and sighs, loudly. She’s gonna kill Zack.

“Oh,” Kimberly says for now, clearly just as caught off guard as Trini. “We’ll...um...we’ll be careful.”

Alpha-5 looks relieved at this. “Then may the force be with you,” he says and Trini’s widen. Kimberly laughs, sounding shocked and bright. “Was I not supposed to say that until _after_ you’re married? Zack didn’t tell me that.”

There’s no point in fighting it. All they can do is thank him and leave before she starts laughing again.

In the light of the setting sun, Kimberly holds out the rings again, testing her own on her left ring finger.

“It fits,” she says and the idea of it having been made from something like that -- by an _android_ no less -- is sort of ridiculous, but Trini wants to cry all the same.

 _It’s perfect,_ she doesn’t say, but Kimberly must know she’s thinking it. She can tell from the way she smiles at her and slowly takes the ring off, sliding them into her bag. She must be thinking the exact same thing.

.

Kimberly actually sleeps in the bed with her that night, no pretense of a makeshift mattress on the floor involved. It’s nice, Trini thinks. It’s the nicest night she’s had in awhile.

And lying there in the cocoon of Kimberly’s blankets, Kimberly’s warm palm on her waist spreading heat through her sleep shirt, she can very nearly forget that her family is somewhere on the other side of town and that time -- as far as they know it -- could be running out.

..

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [cue X-Files theme]
> 
> chapter title from "She's a Riot" by The Jungle Giants.


	5. there's a forever (if you believe it)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welcome back. been a while. late happy easter fool's day. hope you're all enjoying Hayley Kiyoko's album as much as i am.
> 
> apologies for how long i've been going between updates. when i said this thing was finished...i meant before all of my obsessive edits.
> 
> hopefully you enjoy.

..

It’s perfect -- for a time. That time, by Trini’s calculation is exactly seven hours, give or take. However long it is she’s able to sleep and actually forget about her troubles.

Because, the next morning, she’s awoken by the loud blast of an air horn. She wakes so suddenly that she ends up rolling onto the floor and when she peeks over the edge of the mattress, it’s to the sight of the boys standing gleefully in the doorway. Zack is the one holding the air horn, of course, and Jason is trying to hide his snicker behind his palm, and Billy is looking at her semi-apologetically. 

The real sight, of course, is Kimberly -- in full armor -- squaring up against them on the other side of the bed.

_ Fight or flight,  _ she thinks. Or maybe, in this case: roll off the bed or fight.

“What the hell, guys?” Trini pipes in from the floor, before anyone gets hurt.

More specifically, before Kimberly can hurt any of them.

“Well, we were trying to be  _ fun _ , but then your girl got all Kill Bill on us, so, now we’re thinking maybe you don’t deserve it,” Zack says.

As he’s talking,  _ her girl  _ begins to let the armor slide off, down her head, sliding down her neck, chest, arms, until she’s just standing there in her normal pajamas. One side of her hair is sticking up the way it usually does in the morning. She shoots Trini an apologetic look.

“How’d you guys get in here?” is Kimberly’s next question. She crosses her arms over her stomach as if the boys -- in the last year -- have never seen her in a tank top and her sleep shorts before. 

“Your mom let us in,” Billy pipes in, grinning. “She said you’d be awake.”

And, well, it’s hard to be mad when Billy Cranston is smiling at you like that. Trini can already feel her frustration and upset beginning to drain away.

“Get dressed,” Zack commands. He’s waving that air horn threateningly and Trini doesn’t doubt that he’ll use it again, even putting his own ear drums at risk to prove a point. “We have places to meet, people to go.”

She shares this brief look with Kimberly where she thinks they’re silently weighing their options, trying to decide if there may be a way out of this. Whatever it is. Neither of them seems to come up with a good enough excuse, though.

Jason is still laughing. It’s particularly satisfying when Kimberly whacks him and then Zack over the head on their way out of the room.

.

They change in silence and twenty minutes later, they’re sitting in the bed of Jason’s truck, backs pressed up against the cabin and hunkered down in case they should pass one of Angel Grove’s  _ three  _ squad cars. 

Kimberly’s been quiet all morning and Trini can feel a thin edge of something empty in her chest, beside where her own emotions reside. Something that’s ebbing off the other girl. She hasn’t asked about it, too scared of what the answer might be, but she doesn’t have to. Kimberly must know that she’s wondering about it, because she says, “I’m scared,” in a whisper after a particularly jolting thump that sends Trini reeling into her lap. 

Trini grabs a hold of her hand and doesn’t let go again.

It had been Zack’s idea to put them in the back like this. Some way of maintaining the surprise. From this angle, they can’t see where they’re headed and can only string together the context clues of what they’re passing. Trini doesn’t care enough to really try to figure it out, though. Whatever it is, Zack had planned it. It might be best to just remain in the dark for a time.

Later, Trini won’t be certain what she’d meant she was scared of, exactly, because -- at the time -- she’d nearly been able to read it as a joke pertaining to their mystery destination. But Kimberly knew of it the entire time in that car. The only thing Trini thinks she wasn’t privy to was the surprise wake up call. It’s possible that she’d meant what was coming for them in the next week or so. She might have even been talking about  _ them  _ \--  _ this,  _ the wedding, all of it. 

But, now, she doesn’t give it much thought.

“You should be,” is what she offers and maybe it’s the truth.

Kimberly looks beautiful in the early summer air, hair whipping around her face as it comes funneling off the side, off the top of Jason’s truck. Trini holds her hand and looks at her and thinks:  _ finally something that can be  _ **_mine_ ** _. _

If you’d like to know: she’s never had the opportunity to think this before. Not in any way that mattered.

.

They’re at some Go-Kart place, some giant outdoor amusement center with mini golf and those duck rides around a tiny, man-made river painted blue on its porcelain bottom to make the water shine clean. It’s hot already -- early June in California -- and Kimberly helps her step down from the back of the truck.

“Seriously?” she asks, but Kimberly doesn’t seem surprised and that’s the first indicator that something more is going on. “This is your idea of a bachelorette party? Didn’t you watch Sex and the City all the way  _ through _ ?” 

Zack looks sheepish at having been called out on that. He grumbles and looks away, standing on the hot asphalt beside them, and then looks over his shoulder, squinting in the sun. “Listen,  _ you’re  _ the one that said no strippers. I wanted to do the whole party bus thing, but Billy veto’d that, too. You guys didn’t leave me with a lot of good options.”

He’s lying. Trini knows his voice. 

But she lets herself be led by the hand all the way to the front entrance of the park anyway.

“You’re fine,” Kimberly whispers into the cool heat of Trini’s hair, right by her ear. Her breath sends a slight tingle down down her neck. She chases the sentiment with a kiss on the shell of Trini’s ear, and then grabs her hand and tugs her all the way up to the mini golf stand.

.

Try she does. It’s not all bad. She manages to get a hole-in-one on the windmill, which makes Jason so spitting angry that he very nearly tosses his putter onto the fake grass in frustration.

“Calm down, flyboy,” Kimberly tells him, hand on his arm. 

It’s the last time Trini sinks the ball in  _ at all  _ before her seventeenth hit. Jason, at the end of it, is smiling again, but she wonders if part of the reason why is just because he significantly beat the rest of them.

.

It isn’t until after Zack has snatched all of them the greasiest cheese fries in history that Trini sees them, hovering at the edge of the parking lot near the ticket gate. 

Her brothers are looking around frantically and her dad is standing somewhere behind them, squinting behind those dumb sunglasses he always insists on wearing in public. It’s funny, too, because her first instinct is to duck, to hide underneath the picnic table they’re sitting at. But, of course, that’s ridiculous, so she doesn’t. She sits where she is, stiffen though she does, and says, “My dad’s here.”

Billy was in the middle of telling some story or other, but he stops as she says this, turning to look over his shoulder where she’s staring. “Oh,” he says. “Maybe they wanted to have fun, too.”

There’s no malice in his words, just simple awe. Jason is watching now, too, and he twitches on Trini’s right side, like he wants to touch her to comfort her but is sure he’s not permitted something like that at a moment like this.

“Okay,” Zack starts, his mouth turned down. He doesn’t look, he just stares right at her, wiping the grease from his fingers onto a napkin. “Before you get mad --”

“ _ What did you do _ ?” is out of Trini’s mouth like a hiss before she even makes the decision to ask.

“I asked them here --”

“ _ We  _ asked them here,” Kimberly remedies and Trini whips her head around to look at her.

_ Et tu, Brute? _

Kimberly frowns, twitching a hand over Trini’s under the table. “You...you miss them, Trini, and we might not --” 

_ Have time. _

Of course, that part remains unspoken. They’re all trying not to think about them, in some unspoken agreement that they’d much rather pretend everything is fine instead. 

“Part of your list, babe,” Kimberly whispers, voice low and close to Trini’s ear. There’s no point in denying the calm it flicks through her veins, rushing through her at a steadying speed. “I...It’s not real driving, maybe, but there’s Go-Karts and your brothers...Zack ran into them the other day at their baseball game. Don’t be mad.”

And the thing, is, she isn’t anymore.

Mostly because Diego and Alex are past the ticket gate now and turning in circles frantically, trying to find her. She pulls away from Kimberly, pushing herself to her feet and maneuvering out of the picnic table without kicking Jason. They see her in a few seconds and then they’re both running towards her, yelling her name, and --

Who could be mad about that?

.

“Okay, so don’t brake when you turn, and  _ don’t  _ lose your momentum or Zack is going to win and he’s a pain in the ass when he thinks he’s good at something.”

From behind her, Zack says, “Hey!” and Jason laughs.

“It’s sorta true, Zack,” Billy cuts in. “Sorry.”

Her dad had been kind when he’d caught up with the boys. He’d smiled and asked how she was, asked if he could hug her. She’d let him, hugged him back, and then almost asked after her mother.

Of course, she hadn’t quite been able to manage it. He must have understood anyway. The gentle look in his eyes gave him away, and he’d touched the top of her head carefully, briefly, and then said, “Just give her time.”

She hadn’t had the heart to tell him that time was the exact thing she couldn’t promise anyone anymore.

Now they’re waiting for the current race to end, and she’s flanked by both brothers. They’d both been just over the peak of forty-eight inches and she’s spent the past fifteen minutes trying to explain how to drive (go-karts, that is, because this terrible real-life driving advice) in basics to them. Alex is letting her wrap an arm around him and Diego is shaking the fence, watching eagerly.

“Which one is the brake again?” he asks. 

“The one on the left.”

“Which one is left?” Zack asks.

Jason bumps him with his shoulder, scoldingly. 

“Make the ‘L’s with your hands,” Billy tells him and Zack nods seriously, holding up both hands with all his fingers, barring forefingers and thumbs, curled up to make that L-shape.

The attendant announces the winner and the boy in question cheers annoyingly, whooping as he unbuckles himself and tackles his friends on their way out. Then it’s their turn.

“Trini, this is safe right?” Alex asks from the kart beside her.

And she doesn’t know, because she’s only done this once before -- two schools ago, the last time she’d had friends and hadn’t been moving over the summer break -- but she’d been fine then. Then again, she hadn’t been  _ eleven,  _ so now she’s not entirely sure.

“Totally,” comes her answer and Diego flashes her a thumbs up, then a thumbs down and sticks his tongue out at her. “Oh, you’re going down!”

Waiting for their belts to be checked, she looks over the edge of the course where Kimberly is leaned up against the fence with her dad. They’re talking quietly, expressions serious, but her dad doesn’t look angry or anything like that at all. It had been Kimberly that had insisted she sit this one out, rather than joining them. Trini’s heart thuds a painful beat against her ribcage and Kimberly sends her a slight wave when she catches her staring, as does her dad. 

The countdown starts.

And then they’re off. 

Her brothers aren’t bad, but Alex is too tentative, rounding the corners much too slowly. With Zack, it’s much of the same. He swerves and brakes too much and then Trini is right at the front, behind Billy and Jason. Diego comes up beside her and it’s nice.

It’s fun. The warm wind whipping her hair back and Diego laughing to her right, Zack cussing too loudly behind them all and Kimberly cheering from the gate as they finish the first lap. 

“Whoo!” she hears her call and her hands are cupped around her mouth when she looks up. “That’s my fiancée!” 

Her dad is laughing and smiling and she hasn’t seen him that way in so long that she’s nearly able to pretend that it’s not Patrick Kwan at all. That it’s some stranger with his face who supports her decision to get married to a  _ girl  _ so young. Who came all the way here on a Sunday with her brothers just so they could have fun. Like a normal family. Like a functional one.

Billy wins. It’s only a little surprising, given his sincere lack of a driver’s license.

Zack ends up in dead last. He kicks the corner of his kart on his way out, pouting spectacularly. 

Diego jumps at her the moment she gets out. “Can we go again?” he asks and Trini smiles, wraps an arm around his shoulders and then Alex as he comes up on her other side. Past the exit somewhere, Kimberly is smiling with her dad still, waving, and Trini laughs at what her brothers are bickering about and walks towards her, feeling the lightest she has in so long that it’s hard to believe how little time has really passed since she left her house to begin with.

.

“She’s a nice girl, Trinidad,” Patrick Kwan says an hour or so later. Kimberly is playing an arcade game with her brothers somewhere in the back of the place. Zack had challenged Jason to another game of putt-putt some time ago -- Billy had gone with them -- and now she’s standing against the wall of the arcade with her dad, alone for the first time in what feels like forever. “Really.”

It’s the closest she’s gotten to what they talked about, alone together.

( Later that night, swaddled in darkness and her fiancée’s arms, she’ll hear the other half -- 

_ I just told him the truth, that’s all. He deserves that, at least. Your mom, too.  _ )

Trini looks at him, then away, unable to hold eye contact for longer than a second or two. He smiles before she can turn her eyes completely, an easy, warm smile that a father should send their daughter only when they’re stumbling upon a nicer moment than most. 

“She is, isn’t she?” Trini says, easy and slight. She leaves it at that. No need to ruin a good thing.

“I...All I ever wanted for you was someone who feels for you what Kimberly does. She...I’m so happy you’ve found that, baby girl. Even if your mother thinks you’re too young to know what it is you’ve found.”

And, well--

She wasn’t expecting that. 

“I remember when I was twenty and your mother and I had this late class one semester, right?” he starts and Trini looks at him, confused. 

He rarely talks about when he was younger. He rarely talks at all, except in starts and halts that have never really been enough to piece much of their relationship together. 

But now, he smiles at her and then looks away, pushes on. “And we stayed a little after for this project we had to finish and...I offered to walk her home. That’s what you do, y’know? Pretty girl and all.” He smiles at her again. “And we’d been on exactly one date at that point, but I remember standing in front of her dorm and thinking... _ Wow, I never want her to leave me. _ ”

He turns to her again and grins. “Cheesy, right?”

Trini shrugs, looks away. Something is building in the back of her throat and the last thing she wants to do is cry  _ here  _ of all places. Up ahead, Kimberly has finished whatever game it was she was playing and Alex proudly collects the tickets that the machine spits out and then points to the skeeball machines, tugging her towards them. Diego says something that makes Kimberly laugh as she lets herself be led away.

“I’m just...I’m glad you’ve found that,” he tells her. “That you both have. Not everyone is so lucky.”

It’s noisy in the arcade and it’s been something like three years since she’s felt like her and her father actually understand each other. Experiencing it now is so profound, she can’t do anything except swallow and lean into him when he wraps an arm around her shoulders. 

They stand there together for a while and then the twins come trotting back up, showing off their tickets and then begging their dad to take them to the prize counter. Kimberly comes up behind them, just as her dad departs with a squeeze of Trini’s arm. 

“You okay?” Kimberly asks, smiling worriedly, as if she’s trying to  _ make  _ everything okay with just the low tone of her voice.

And Trini has never been one for P.D.A. Not ever. She supposes that hasn’t changed. Not exactly. 

But she grabs Kimberly by the collar of her t-shirt and tugs her down, kissing her before Kimberly can ask what’s going on. Her lips taste like that peach chapstick she’s always tugging out of her backpack between classes to roll onto her lips. 

It’s a nice kiss. Short, but it does the trick.

Kimberly smiles against her lips and when Trini rocks back onto her heels, pulling away, she says, “We’re allowed to do this in public now?” with her eyes half-lidded like she’s half-asleep, half-drugged. “Did I miss the memo? Not that I’m complaining, just --”

Trini’s laugh cuts her off and Kimberly opens her eyes all the way, blinking. “Thank you,” she says and Kimberly gives her a small frown of confusion.

“For what?” she asks, but it never gets answered.

At least, not with words. Trini leans up and covers the other girl’s frown back up with another kiss and Kimberly sighs into Trini’s mouth, pulling her closer, right there in the middle of the arcade.

.

The apartment is finished by the time they get home. Trini has never been inside of it in any sort of official way -- just once, back when the carpeting had first been put down and Kimberly had been saying things like,  _ At least, this way, it won’t be as awkward when I don’t leave for college  _ \-- but Kimberly’s parents are waiting for them when Jason drops them back off that afternoon.

Across the pavement, through the side door, and up the narrow stairs at the back of the garage, through another door with a nice enough latch and lock. It’s a nice enough place. The carpeting is dark gray and plush and the bathroom has been remodeled in the past few months. Much nicer than Trini would ever be able to afford with a part-time job anyway. 

Most importantly, though: it’s cool. The air conditioning is working.

“Well?” Ted asks five minutes in. Trini is standing in the side bedroom -- there are  _ two  _ \-- and she can hear Kimberly in the kitchen with him. “What do you guys think? Big enough to hold my grandbabies?”

A joke, of course. Trini laughs. 

“Good to know what one good gutter-cleaning can get you in this family,” Kimberly jokes and there’s a scuffle and her laughing, her dad laughing as he shoves her playfully, no doubt. In that way he does.

Trini doesn’t see it. She’s looking into the closet in the bedroom still, and she doesn’t hear it when Maddy comes into the room behind her either.

She jumps when she finally spots her, not having expected her in the room and Maddy throws her an apologetic smile. “Sorry,” she says softly. Then, “What do you think?”

Trini doesn’t have enough words for how appreciative she is, so she smiles and says, “It’s great. Thank you.”

But she’s not really sure what she’s thanking her for exactly.

Maddy takes a careful breath, slowly in then out. Her hands are clasped in front of her waist and she looks so much like Kimberly -- or Kimberly looks like her -- in the dim setting sunlight streaming through the venetian blinds on the windows. “I...I want you to know that we’re happy for you two,” she says finally, softly.

Trini isn’t expecting this conversation and she freezes. All of her does. She grips the doorknob of the closet a little too tightly in her hand, aching her palm. Quietly, she breathes a noise that sounds like, “Oh.”

“I’m...I’m not sure what all Kimberly told you, but...when she first told us, we were... _ surprised.  _ To say the least.” Maddy Hart makes a lot more eye contact than Trini is necessarily used to. It’s jolting, but she forces herself not to look away. “I...I can’t say I ever expected her to get married so young and she’s always been an impulsive girl, so I simply thought this was just another case of that. But...you’re more than I knew to want for her.”

It’s unexpectedly emotional and Trini isn’t sure what to do with her hands. They’re shaking, that’s all she really knows.

Maddy herself seems shocked by her words. As though she hadn’t meant to bare quite that much. She stops, a frown twisting at her lips. Then she smiles, “I just thought I should tell you that.”

They don’t hug or anything. Trini’s never really been one for that kind of thing anyway, and Maddy, as far as she knows, hasn’t ever been either. But it’s nice enough to stand in the same space as one another and simply be understood.

On their way back into the house, Kimberly’s arm is heavy around her waist and she draws her in as they walk behind her parents. “Okay?” she asks, always so slight, so caught, so careful.

Trini leans her head onto Kimberly’s shoulder briefly, then rights herself. “Perfect,” is her answer, and it’s more than enough for now.

.

There’s one final test on Monday and then the next two days are spent chattering in classes. 

This is what it is to be in the final stages of becoming an adult -- those last few days before graduation:

In AP Biology, Kimberly sits beside her those final two days and holds Trini’s right hand in her left, draws flowers and loops and a terrible graphite transposition of Trini’s silhouette onto her empty notebook. There are notes in the first third, or so. It’s Kimberly’s second notebook this year and she’d only needed part of it. The rest of it, she fills with doodles and silly words 

(she writes  _ Mrs. Trini Hart _ on a couple of pages and Trini laughs because she’s not sure how much of a joke it is)

while she holds Trini’s hand. On the very last day, when the final bell rings, she tosses it into the wastebasket on the way out.

“Should have given school a chance,” Zack says as he waits by their locker. “This part isn’t so bad.”

This part, he means, is finally being free. 

He won’t be walking with the rest of the class. Won’t be graduating at all. It’s hard to when you haven’t shown up for ninety-percent of the classes and are considered truant by the county. A worry, perhaps, for when they get out the other side of whatever is coming. 

_ If _ .

But he’s here now, and he leans against the wall, watching Trini pack her things heavy in her backpack and Kimberly take down the little pictures she’d hung up of all of them the week after they’d beaten Rita and she’d officially moved into Trini’s locker.

Up ahead, down the hall, Trini can see Jason shouldering one of Billy’s bags. He’d brought an extra -- too many knicknacks in his locker to fit into the one. Billy closes his locker, pockets the combination lock, and then the boys turn their feet in their direction. Jason waves.

“What’s on the agenda for tonight?” Zack asks this of Jason casually, as if it’s not two days before Trini’s  _ wedding _ .

Her throat has felt tight the past two nights, spent rotating around the other’s houses so that they can all get time in with their family. It’s been normal, even as Trini had  _ tried  _ not to remember what it was they’re all working so hard to forget -- so hard, it leaves her exhausted by the end of the night. 

Yesterday, Jason’s little sister had tried to take her temperature with this tiny thermometer with a bear’s face because she’d “looked sick” and it had made Kimberly so worried that she’d stopped in the middle of painting a squirming Zack’s toenails to take them home and put her to bed. 

_ What’s going on with you?  _ she’d asked carefully, her fingers trailing down the side of Trini’s face in the darkness of her bedroom. Trini hadn’t answered, but only because she hadn’t quite known how to say that she doesn’t know. Is it possible for a feeling to cause a fever?

Now, she eyes Trini for a moment -- as if sizing up if she’s feeling ill again -- and then turns to Jason, waiting for an answer.

Jason shrugs, looking at his feet. “Up to you guys,” he says, and that’s not the leader that any of them know. The whole interaction feels off-balanced, like they might be sent tipping off the edge of the world just because Jason Scott isn’t taking charge for the first time since they’ve all come together.

“This feels weird,” Billy says suddenly. He’s looking up and down the hallway at the other students, the seniors cleaning out their lockers and some of the teachers hanging out against their classroom doors, watching. “Or, or...sudden. I don’t know. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah,” Trini tells him. “It does.”

She knows what he means. Graduation has a way of making the halls of the high school you’ve spent so long hating look a little nicer, a little brighter. Her locker is empty now and she’s getting emotional for no reason.

“Actually, would you guys wanna help Trini and me get our things into the garage? I could do it myself, but my mom might have a heart attack if she saw me carrying my eighty-pound mattress by myself.”

Kimberly’s voice has an airy tone to it. She’d brought up moving into the apartment above the garage the night before, she thinks, but it’s hard to remember. Trini had been texting her brothers at the time and they’d been sending messages too fast for her to really focus on anything else.

The boys are silent, mulling this over. But they’ve spent the past three nights inside, curled together in the dark with nothing but the TV and each other for company. A night actually accomplishing something must sound better by leagues.

Trini knows that it does for her.

“Sure!” Billy chirps.

Then Jason’s, “Of course, yeah.”

Finally, Zack sighing, huffing. “My mom told me to never give into peer pressure, but sure.”

Trini kicks him in the foot and he wiggles his eyebrows at her and then throws an arm around her neck, catching her off guard and nearly off balance.

It’s Kimberly that closes their locker door and takes the combination off the handle, slipping it into her bag. She smiles at Trini. It’s bittersweet. Trini thinks she’d still feel this way even if she weren’t certain that they all might die soon.

Out of one shared space, and into another, it would seem.

Kimberly catches her hand on their way out of the school and Zack doesn’t pull his arm away. Jason and Billy lead the way, opening doors for them and already laying out plans for tonight, what they’ll be moving first. 

In the parking lot, Zack presses a loud, smacking kiss to Trini’s head, then Kimberly’s, then Jason’s -- who tries and fails to squirm away, swatting at him -- and finally, Billy, from whom he asks permission first. He hoists himself into the bed of Jason’s truck, yelling, “Hey, um, could I get a ride?”

Jason rolls his eyes. “Like I have a choice,” he grumbles, then looks over at Kimberly. “Meet you guys there,” he says and then he and Billy are in his rumbling truck and heading off onto the street and towards Kimberly’s house.

In Kimberly’s car, though, Trini looks back at the high school -- all those teenagers still streaming out in excited droves. 

“Billy’s right,” she says quiet. “This feels weird.”

Kimberly looks at her and then past her at the school. “Yeah,” she agrees. Then, “But only if you squint.” She laughs, the sound lifting an echo of it from Trini, then she throws the car into gear and peels out onto the road, the radio up full blast and the summer heat whipping in through the open windows.

The weird feeling is freedom, and it’s enough to temporarily distract from whatever else is building. But it isn’t as if any of them have ever known the feeling well enough to recognize it immediately.

.

It takes something like five hours to get everything out into the garage. It would have taken a lot less time if Zack had spent more time carrying boxes out than he had taking lemonade breaks in the kitchen with Kimberly’s parents.

By the time they’re done, Jason has his shirt off and draped over his shoulder and Billy is wiping his forehead with the sleeves of his t-shirt. Kimberly, with the air blasting throughout the apartment, stands in the middle of the bedroom, looks at her mattress on the floor, at the suitcases filled with her clothes, the empty dresser, and the untaped boxes littering the rest of the space and declares them finished. 

Trini stands in the doorway watching her, trailing a bead of sweat as it slides down the slender column of her throat and into the dip of her collarbone. Her mouth is dry suddenly, but the lemonade is too far away. 

“Take a picture, creeper,” Kimberly jokes, biting her lip to keep her grin in check. She has her short hair pulled back as much as it can be and she’d shed her overshirt some time ago and chucked it into the yard in frustration when she’d been carrying that dresser towards the garage with Jason on the other end. Now she’s in just her tank top and Trini can’t breathe, which is possibly the most overdramatic and pathetic realization she’s ever had about herself.

“No way,” she manages, though it sounds more like a croak than anything else. “That would require looking away.”

They haven’t talked about what happened on Sunday -- those kisses in the arcade and everything that still remains unspoken, undefined between them. The closest they’d gotten had been the conversation that night, and Kimberly edging around the details of whatever had been said between her and Trini’s dad.

It’s funny that Trini had sort of thought kissing Kimberly that first time could have served to make her less nervous. It’s possible that it’s only succeeded in making things that much worse. Her heart feels ready to beat itself through her rib cage.

Kimberly laughs and then crosses the room until there’s hardly any space between them anymore, warm hands brushing across the curve of Trini’s hips to tug her closer. “That was actually kind of smooth,” she says softly and she’s moving closer, eyes beginning to flicker closed so Trini presses up on her tiptoes and leans in further, but --

There’s  _ always  _ a but.

“Is there anything --” Comes Jason’s voice from right behind them, and then, “Oh, sorry.” 

Kimberly pulls away and shoots him a glare and Trini’s face flushes hotly in embarrassment, turning her head and hiding her face beneath her palm. “Put a shirt on. Don’t be that guy.”

Jason apologizes again and Trini understands why. Kimberly isn’t someone you want to speak to you in that tone. 

“I think that’s it,” Trini tells him when the blush on her cheeks has lessened enough to make eye contact possible again, “For our stuff, that is.”

And it has to be. Kimberly’s room is empty after that last trip, save for a couple of posters that she’s promised to retrieve later.

Billy is standing in the hallway behind Jason, but there’s a couch in there now -- new and leather and nice and they’d come in here this afternoon to find it already waiting for them, but neither Maddy or Ted will comment on it. There’s a TV, too, and a shower curtain already hung and it’s  _ nice _ .

Trini’s moved a lot of places. She realizes that as she’s walking back down the steps to find Zack -- lounging on the front porch with Kimberly’s parents -- but no matter how little time she gets in this place, she’s fairly certain it’s going to be her favorite. 

This is the home she’s building with Kimberly -- who grabs her hand when they’re scraping their sneakers against the grass, the sun setting in the sky and the bugs already chirping in the distance. Kimberly who smiles at her and presses a chaste kiss to the back of her knuckles.

Kimberly who laughs at whatever expression Trini doesn’t mean to make, who releases her hand to wrap an arm around her, and says, “To be continued,” against her temple with another kiss that doesn’t nothing to help her.

.

They throw open the windows that night, air conditioning be damned. Only two boxes had been unpacked after they’d gotten everything moved in. They’d been immediately met with pizza downstairs and had spent the rest of the evening sprawled out in Kimberly’s backyard with the boys.

Later, though, in the quiet of the night, Trini lays with Kimberly’s ear pressed to the flat of her breastbone, her arm curled around the other girl’s shoulders. The moon is big and bright in the sky outside and she can just hear the crickets in the yard. She listens to Kimberly’s small puffs of breath, that steady in and out, harmonizing with the sound of the breeze through the grass outside, rustling the leaves. 

There hadn’t been another kiss. The boys had made sure of that -- staying later than Trini would have welcomed them, and somehow, that heat in her gut had abated sometime during the hour or so spent under Kimberly’s parents’ watchful gazes. They’d changed for bed in separate rooms, as if they hadn’t spent the past week sharing a much smaller space, and Trini is burning again, even though it’s a cool enough night outside.

“Go to sleep,” Kimberly mumbles, careful and slow. Her voice is heavy from exhaustion and the muscles of her arm had been shaking earlier, when they’d first gotten into bed. She’d almost wanted to tease her for being a superhero that gets tired after a couple hours of moving boxes. But Kimberly’s hair had been messy and, shaking muscles or no, there’s something to her in a tank top that Trini has never been able to fully handle. “You’re thinking too loud.”

Trini stills her fingers in Kimberly’s hair, curling them instead, and looks down at the top of her head. “Sorry,” she mumbles, quiet.

Kimberly yawns and turns her head, digging her chin into Trini’s sternum so she can look at her. “S’okay,” she manages, blinking. “You good?”

The leaves rustle outside and Kimberly loosely grips Trini’s forearm, pulling her wrist to her lips and brushing them against the skin there. 

Trini shrugs. “I’m fine. Just nervous, I guess.”

“Nervous about what?”

A harder question than you might think, made much harder by how close they are right now. Sharing her bed is one thing. Being engaged to her, another. But mixed together along with the memory of that almost-kiss that Jason had interrupted just hours prior (and the others that had been fulfilled, that had come before) is nearly too much for Trini to be able to understand. 

She’s just not sure how to put all these thoughts into words that translate fully. Because she’s nervous around Kimberly -- she always has been and she can’t imagine that, were she to voice this aloud, it wouldn’t be news to her. Kimberly has to know by now -- from that very first instance of having been tugged off a cliff  _ willingly  _ that Trini would travel to the ends of the earth if Kimberly just asked pretty enough. 

But sharing her bed was never something she thought she’d have with her. 

Not like this. 

For months, she’d thought she’d been imagining all those long looks, those lingering touches and then Kimberly proposed at the end of the world, Kimberly kissed her right there in the driveway and Kimberly bought her an apartment (more or less) and clearly she’s not imagining it. 

_ I don’t do things I don’t want to. _

Something about it not being in her head makes her far more nervous than it being some made-up farce. 

So she tries to send her a placating smile. Something to even out the tension that she’s unwittingly placed between them. It’s late and they need to sleep, more for the social sake of it than anything else.

“Everything, I think,” is what she decides on finally and something soft comes across Kimberly’s face, a slight frown that Trini has only seen maybe once more. It’s worried, of course, but in a different way than usual. Her heart it drumming too fast and she taps her fingers on Kimberly’s shoulder blades to the same rhythm -- wishes she could slow it down.

Kimberly rests her nose against Trini’s ribcage and doesn’t move, she just watches her with careful, waiting eyes. Then, “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” comes Trini’s answer, and she’s thinking of their coins and finding them in the mine that night; she’s thinking of superpowers and that first morning after she’d woken up, ripping her bedroom door off its hinges on accident and then pulling it away to reveal her mother’s concerned face and all the drug tests and lectures about  _ ‘roid rage _ that had followed; she’s thinking about Rita smashing her around her own bedroom; mostly she’s thinking about destiny and Kimberly Hart’s slow lips pressing a tiny kiss into her stomach, right through her sleep shirt. 

“It’s just weird, y’know? Like it’s too big for just me. I’m too small for something like this.”

And she means all of it, but the only truth Kimberly understands in the moment is her own. Arms tighten around Trini’s waist. “Is this a metaphor about our engagement?”

Maybe it is 

( it definitely is )

so she settles for shrugging, and looking up out the window again, just so she doesn’t have to meet Kimberly’s careful eyes. 

“Are you actually scared?” 

Trini wants to lie, and she hesitates, wondering if she should. But, finally, “Yeah.”

Another gust of wind outside, rustling the blinds the slightest bit. It’s only a little hot, and the sheets are bunched around both of their waists now. Kimberly’s fingers sleepwalk across the mattress and find the firm of Trini’s shoulder. She presses her fingertips into her shirt. 

Her voice, her answer, finally comes a moment or two later, gravelly and vulnerable. “Yeah,” she says. “Me, too.”

They look at each other for a long moment that seems to take even longer than it might under different circumstance. Trini realizes that Kimberly must have understood the magnitude of what she’s afraid of, after all, and there’s some comfort, at least, in knowing that she’s not the only one who feels it. 

Kimberly turns her head so that it’s her ear pressed to Trini’s ribs and not her chin. She’s quiet for a moment, Trini carding her fingers back through Kimberly’s curls. “Your heart is going to break out of your chest, Trin,” she says, a joke. It’s titled the slightest bit by restrained laughter.

Trini resumes the tapping of her fingers, the warmth Kimberly is radiating through her clothes and into her skin calming. She laughs. “It hasn’t yet,” she says.

When she falls asleep, it’s with Kimberly still curled around her body. It’s the lucky way she wakes, too.

..

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i keep having them fall asleep at the end of chapters. weird.
> 
> chapter title from "Forever" by Ykiki Beat.


	6. i swear i choose forever

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took a solid week to get posted. stuff happens. 
> 
> last chapter should be out by the end of the weekend.
> 
> one big solid thank you to everyone who's taken the time to leave their thoughts (and kudos!). always so greatly appreciated. you're the best.
> 
> okay, here come(s) the bride(s) because we're finally to the wedding, folks.
> 
> enjoy.

The day before her _wedding,_ there are flapjacks made from Bisquik in her and Kimberly’s kitchen. There’s Kimberly getting the mix all over the counter and burning the first five and there’s Trini cleaning up after her, moving quickly to turn off the smoke alarm on the wall and then showing her the proper way. There’s Kimberly laughing and pressing a kiss to Trini’s head as she stands in front of the oven, her arm going to rest around Trini’s waist.

Then later, they curl on the couch with the windows still thrown open to the early summer heat, the birds chirping distantly and their phones buzzing -- one of the boys, no doubt, wondering what they should do today -- with Kimberly’s lips pressed to Trini’s temple; soft, soft, soft.

Of course there’ll be time for the others after breakfast. After sticky fingers and wiping away a dribble of syrup from Kimberly’s chin. After Kimberly holding Trini tight -- her front to Kimberly’s back -- and watching the public access channel because they don’t have cable out here.

There’ll be time for Jason and Zack swinging over to the house and Billy asking what they want on their pizza and Jason calling to order it for them and Zack making some sort of joke about the upcoming honeymoon or whatever. There’ll be plenty of time for everything.

At least, she thinks, on a smaller scale.

Because it’s Kimberly’s who’s created time for these things she never thought she’d do and there’s still that clawing gnaw in her chest -- that aching absence of _something_ \-- the way there had been before Rita had come smashing into her bedroom last year. It’s still there, ever-present, but for the first morning in a long time, she doesn’t let herself worry about that.

And she’s been thinking it for a few days -- _longer_ maybe, if you count daydreams you’ll go to the grave swearing you never had -- so she finally brings herself to say, “I, um...I’ve been thinking that...maybe I can take your name...Once we’re married? If that’s okay.”

There’s silence. Just long enough that she’s certain Kimberly going stiff behind her, around her, means something worse.

“I mean, I don’t have to. I just thought --” She pauses. Swallows. “I mean, if my brothers get married, one of them can keep our last name and pass it on and...I just...You don’t have any siblings and --”

Of course, _pass it on_ is code for giving your surname to your children and now she’s gone and implied that this marriage they’ll have -- if they live -- could one day include things like _children_ . Little baby _Harts_ who call both of them _Mom._ She’s certain she’s never felt so close to throwing up before as she waits for Kimberly to say something.

Then, quietly, as if she can’t believe what she’s heard, Kimberly says, “Are you sure?”

The air it takes brushes through Trini’s hair and she blinks, thinking about how much easier this would be if they weren’t sitting like this -- if she could just see Kimberly’s expression to gauge how she’s feeling.

“Yeah,” she says, and she settles further against Kimberly’s chest, playing with her fingers around her own waist. “I’m sure. If...If you’re okay with that.”

There’s another moment of pause and then Kimberly presses a kiss to the back of her head, then her ear. Kimberly says, “Come here,” in this soft voice that pools heat in the pit of Trini’s stomach, and then she’s being turned by Kimberly’s guiding hands until she’s straddling her. She’s three seconds away from saying, _what’s going on_ , but she doesn’t get the chance.

Kimberly kisses her and Trini lets her, she kisses her back, sighs with hands braced on Kimberly’s bony shoulders as, “I would love that, Trini,” is whispered into her neck, followed by the graze of the other girl’s teeth against her pulse point.

Trini closes her eyes, curling her fingers into the soft fabric of Kimberly’s t-shirt. “Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

And if her voice trembles, Kimberly doesn’t say a word about it. She just trails her mouth back up, covering Trini’s parted lips with her own and it’s really something to be eighteen-years-old and kissing your fiancée -- your _best friend_ \-- at what might be the end of the world.

.

That night, Kimberly comes to bed late. Trini lies in the bed, under the covers, and listens to the crunch of footsteps outside in the driveway, and Kimberly’s quiet voice.

She’s on the phone with someone. Trini doesn’t know who.

All she knows is what she’d been offered, and all Kimberly had offered was, “I...um...I’ll be right back, okay? I have to do something.”

And Trini’s been a mess of nerves all day. She can still feel the heat of Kimberly’s breath against her collarbone earlier, fingers in her hair. Zack had given her a knowing look when he’d arrived late in the afternoon and even with her hair combed and hidden in her beanie, she was certain he could tell that it had been ruffled by someone else’s fingers just hours before.

The footsteps stop outside, pausing, and Trini presses her fingers into the soft of the blankets bunched around her waist.

If she listens past the crickets, past the wind and the distant rumble of the freeway, if she really _tries_ , she can just hear Kimberly’s voice, carried lightly through the night to the window, and saying, “--know it would mean the _world_ to her if you could--” and nothing else.

Trini closes her eyes. Her fingers shake, so she presses them under her hips, pinning them to the mattress at an odd angle, and tries to breathe deeply through her mouth.

Kimberly comes trudging back upstairs a moment or two later. And there are so many things that Trini loves about her, but she doesn’t think she’s ever been so in love with the _sound_ of someone before -- the creak of the front door; the turn of the lock; shoes being kicked off; socks padding into the bedroom, followed by the unmistakable sound of her changing out of her clothes.

Kimberly slides into bed and Trini knows she’s being watched before she even opens her eyes, which she does a moment later.

“You’re awake,” Kimberly whispers and Trini looks at her, tries to see the truth of that half-conversation somewhere in the deep of her eyes. There’s nothing.

At least -- nothing she can read.

“Yeah.”

“Sorry if I woke you.”

“You didn’t,” Trini tells her, but she offers nothing else.

Kimberly lies down fully and tugs some of the blankets over to her side of the bed, shuffling and flopping until she’s comfortable. Finally, her arm comes out to rest around Trini’s waist, tugging her a little closer. “We’re getting married tomorrow,” she says and Trini’s heart thumps away in her chest.

She sighs. Closes her eyes again, and when she opens them, Kimberly is smiling at her in a way she can’t help but return, nerves be damned. “Yeah,” she says, “We are.”

.

The courthouse smells like Pine Sol. That’s all she can properly think as she stands in the men’s restroom with Zack guarding the door, trying to tuck her shirt in a little better. It’s one of Jason’s -- button-down, white -- but the tie is Billy’s -- bright yellow. She looks ridiculous, mostly because the shirt is tucked into jeans and it’s too big to begin with. But she supposes it doesn’t matter.

Beyond the door, she can hear voices -- her brothers, for one, who’d shown up with her dad in tow, and Kimberly’s parents as well. Something is buzzing beside the emptiness in her chest. Nerves, perhaps. She’s not entirely certain.

“Lookin’ good,” Zack chirps around a glob of bubble gum that he’s been popping incessantly for the past ten minutes.

Trini eyes his reflection in the mirror -- the careful slouch of his posture as he leans, arms crossed, against the wooden door. He’s smirking. Most importantly: he’s _lying_. “No,” she says, “I don’t.”

The shirt has lumped in the upper thighs of her jeans. She prods at a particularly large mass of it through the material with her finger, until it’s mostly flattened out.

Zack rolls his eyes. “Well, the clothes don’t, no. But your face is hot.”

He wiggles his eyebrows. She’d punch him in the arm -- _hard_ \-- if it weren’t for the fact that it makes her feel a little better.

“Kim probably looks a hundred times better,” she gripes. “I’ll look like a troll next to her.”

“But a very cute troll.” He rolls himself up from the door and crosses the room to stand behind her, placing his too-warm hands on her shoulders and staring at her in the mirror with a serious face. “It’s gonna be fine, you know. Kim loves you. A super gross amount.”

It’s funny: her first instinct is to tell him that Kimberly doesn’t. That it’s not true. But the words never come.

Instead, she finds herself staring at him in the mirror, watching the careful crease of his smile, the way his lips are turned up, because when Zack is happy -- for himself, for someone else -- he doesn’t ever have the decency to hide it. And he may be a lot of things -- annoying, reckless, bold -- but he’s never been a liar.

And Kimberly may be her best friend, but her vision of her has always been skewed by something. Apprehension, perhaps. Or maybe by her own flawed idea of what it is that Kimberly is thinking or feeling at any given moment. Zack, though --

Zack sees nothing but truth. That’s always been true. He straddles the line of good and bad -- not ever quite becoming either, but always, annoyingly _right_.

So she believes him. She has no other choice and the ceremony is ten minutes away now, if the time on her lockscreen can be trusted. “Okay,” she says easily, and Zack opens his lips to reveal a wide, bright-white and toothy smile, perhaps on the verge of teasing her again, but he’s interrupted, of course, by a knock at the door.

.

It’s her mother (of course, _of course_ ) and June Ortiz steps into the bathroom with a graceless expression on her face, lips turned down in a serious frown. Her eyes are light -- they blaze under the fluorescent, milk-aisle-bright of the ceiling fixtures.

Zack must sense the tension -- either himself, or through the tentative connection they all have between one another. Either way, he squeezes Trini’s shoulder once and excuses himself, stepping around June with a careful smile in greeting. He shuts the door behind himself.

“What are you doing here?” Trini asks after too long a silence, the minutes tick-ticking down.

They only have so long to fix this.

“I wouldn’t miss my only daughter’s wedding,” comes June’s response. It’s clipped, careful, into something resembling an unspoken apology.

Trini crosses her arms. She’s always crossing her arms in front of her mother -- as far back as she remembers. She’d done it the night after she’d told her mother, in quiet, fearful stammers about the girl from her freshman English class, with the pretty red hair. She’d done it every morning after every move in every dining room because, what choice does a child have when they have no choice?

So she does it again, here. One final resistance against the unrelenting, clumsy tide of a mistaken mother’s love.

“I shouldn’t have...I said a lot of things I didn’t mean, honey. A...I didn’t mean them, but --”

June looks caught, captured by her own miscalculation of what a proper apology should be comprised of. Her daughter watches and waits and, mostly, offers no help.

“I...I’ve spent so much of your life trying to protect you,” June tells her, “I...You were this little girl with a big heart who cried every time a classmate didn’t say ‘hi’ back in the morning. Because it hurt you that deeply. You...The first time you saw The Lion King, you slept with me and your father for a week because you were so concerned about whether or not Simba would be okay without his dad around. You...You love with everything you are and I’d always hoped that you’d have time to decide how to love yourself like that, too.”

Trini leans heavy against the sink and watches her mother, wringing her hands together in the bathroom five minutes before she’s supposed to get married. The counter digs hard into the small of her back, but she does not move or readjust.

“I thought you might have...misunderstood or...I just wanted to protect you, but…”

Here, she trails off, as if she’s not certain what direction the rest of the narrative she’s been spinning should take. She looks away and Trini stands there, wanting to comfort a woman she hasn’t known well since she was old enough to chafe against the walls that had been built around her.

Finally, June looks back up, smiling, eyes still bright and shining now, and Trini moves forward a little, aching to provide some sort of comfort, but she doesn’t move any farther.

“Kimberly is a lovely girl,” is what her mother says next and she’s said it before, maybe, but she’s never meant it _like this_. “She...She’s been calling the house all week, trying to speak to me, and I...when I finally did, she...She’s already a part of this family, Trinidad. Just because she loves you the way she does. I’m...I’m so happy for what you’ve found with her.”

And Trini will ask Kimberly later -- much later -- what was meant by this, what she’d said, but for now, she lets herself be folded into her mother’s arms. She lets herself cry, feels her mother cry, as well, and says, “I forgive you,” in a whisper so light that it nearly goes unheard by the both of them.

.

Their wedding is the biggest event the Angel Grove Municipal Court has seen in years. Somehow, the boys have gotten permission to hang lights around the edges of the seats, around the jury box and the witness stand the judge stands awkwardly behind them all as a huge crowd filters in behind the brides-to-be.

Kimberly’s parents, Trini’s parents and brothers, three boys in ill-fitting business casual wear and Billy’s mom smiling and crying already.

Normally, they’d been told, it’s just the betrothed, a witness, and a judge.

“Ready?” Kimberly whispers in a pretty pink sundress from Trini’s left side. Jason had picked a handful of weeds from the courthouse yard that are now in Kimberly’s left hand. He’d offered her some, but her hands are sweaty enough already. They’re shaking far too much for her to be held accountable for holding anything other than Kimberly’s hand.

“Yeah,” she says, and she means it, even though she’d almost stopped breathing when she’d come out of the bathroom with her mother to see Kimberly waiting for her; even as she feels like she’s about to throw up. “I’m ready.”

They come to a stop in front of the judge, which feels sudden, too soon. Like it can’t be happening yet and Trini is pretty sure that you’re supposed to walk down the aisle in slow steps to the beat of whatever song is playing. But maybe that only counts in a traditional wedding, when the groom is waiting at the altar and the bride enters behind him, alone except for whomever is giving her away, and there’s music playing in the first place.

Kimberly beautiful, Trini thinks. She can’t form any sort of rational thought when they turn to face each other. Her hair pinned back in curls and this is for _her._ Trini realizes that in an instant and it’s like every moment, every millisecond her and Kimberly have ever spent together comes crashing into her at once.

First-meeting hands clasped in the Cranston’s old van and being chased up the side of a mountain and cautious smiles from across a coffee shop table and all those _months_ of Kimberly in her life, Kimberly invading her space and her mind and her time and her heart and now--

She just never expected to make it to this point, that’s all.

It’s been two weeks since Kimberly’s proposal, two-and-a-half since Billy called attention to that feeling that’s only been getting worse each day since.

And here they are.

There’s a greeting, said by the judge, and then he reads their names from whatever piece of paper he’s holding. He’s wearing jeans and he’d argued with Zack -- who’s zig-zagging around the room with the Hart’s video camera -- that his bald spot might shimmer too much on camera, but now he’s smiling at the two of them, collected and calm where they’re nervous.

Kimberly’s fingers grapple at Trini’s and Trini curls her palm around Kimberly’s hand and _squeezes._

More words are said. They’d had to fill out a form when they’d paid their fee for what would be said and the judge sticks to the script. And there’s a call for vows, of course, because this is a wedding and Trini isn’t sure what it is she’s saying, exactly.

Only that she’s babbling without a plan -- ears flushed red under the cover of her hair from embarrassment -- but her heartbeat is steady and sure as it rocks against her ribs. Kimberly’s crying. She must have said something right. From the side, Trini thinks she can just hear her mother crying as well.

Later, watching the video playback Zack recorded, she’ll hear herself say: “You’re probably the scariest person I’ve ever met, Kim. Not...not because...I don’t know. The first time I was alone with you, I thought I was going to have a heart attack. That’s how badly I wanted to impress you. I’d be lying if I said it’s gotten any easier since then. I don’t...I don’t really know how we got here, Kim. I don’t know if it’s because we...we might be running out of time or because we...we’re young or stubborn. But, I’d like to say that I think we’re here getting married today for one reason. Or...for two; because I love you and you love me. And sometimes that’s all you need.”

Kimberly pulls her hand away for a moment to swipe at her eyes and when Trini spares their families a glance, Jason is pulling a similar motion and Zack looks on the verge of the same.

“I, um...I can’t beat that,” Kimberly says a moment later and Trini lets out this scared, little laugh -- afraid, for a moment, that she’s overstepped her bounds and embarrassed herself completely. “But, I...I promise I’ll love you and look after you as long as I live.”

Trini laughs again, sadder this time. More weighted than any she’s ever loosed before. “Might not be much longer,” she jokes, her voice lowered so that only Kimberly can hear.

But the judge has heard, and he stiffens, confused. Kimberly rolls her eyes and then wipes at them again, sniffing quietly.

It’s only a minute or two longer after that. Not even. Courthouse ceremonies are designed to be anything but long.

And then there’s a smattering of applause and Zack is whistling through his fingers and Kimberly staggers forward, tugging Trini in before she can worry about her mother, her father, her _brothers_ watching and then--

They’re kissing -- harder than they maybe should in front of their _parents_ (her lips are going to bruise) -- but Kimberly’s fingers curl Trini’s hair and those flowers are smashed between them and the judge is saying _Mrs. and Mrs. Hart_ and--

She just can’t bring herself to care about what’s appropriate or not, that’s all.

.

The reception is held at the Hart’s house, and it’s not much of a reception save for the wedding cake, and the dance floor that Billy and his mom clear out in the front living room, pushing the furniture high to the sides of the wall to leave room. Not that they really need to. Only Zack dances -- long-limbed and uncoordinated and the others laugh, embarrassedly. More for the sake of having something to do to excuse them from taking part.

Kimberly won’t stop touching her. Maybe it’s what she hadn’t meant to say during the ceremony. Maybe this is just what happens when you’ve filed a marriage certificate that both of you have signed. Her hand flutters from the small of Trini’s back, to her wrists, to her hips and around again. She laughs with her parents, with Jason and they have those wedding bands that Alpha-5 gave them on already and Trini can’t help but wonder at how _different_ her hand looks with it on.

It’s almost absurd.

There’s cake -- ice cream with frosting spelling out _Congratulations!_ \-- from Dairy Queen because the boys had been left in charge of that. Kimberly doesn’t smash a slice in Trini’s mouth, thank God, and Trini spares her the same. There’s champagne -- Kimberly’s dad winks at her when he pops the cork off -- and then it’s like everyone wants to give a toast:

Jason is talking about the night they’d all met (he leaves out the finer details, at least), about their final year of high school, and how amazing it’s been to watch her and Kimberly’s friendship blossom (he’s careful to say ‘relationship’, but Trini knows what he means, all the same).

( there’s _more_ of course, because they’ve fought rogue putties together and they’re the arms of their team’s giant robot weapon thingy, but Jason lets all of that remain unspoken between the five of them, and maybe that’s what makes it feel all the more poignant )

Diego and Alex blush bright red at everyone’s eyes being on them as they talk about how angry Trini always to be before; how it was always nice when Kimberly came over, because she was nice and she made Trini nicer and she has pretty hair, too.

( that last bit is shared unintentionally by Diego, who turns even redder when he realizes what he’s just confessed, and Kimberly laughs and curls an arm around his shoulders while Trini scowls at the smug look on his face when she does )

Billy says something about everyone coming from stardust and maybe they’re from the same star; maybe that’s why they’re all in the same room together.

( it’s much longer than that, and better said, because it’s Billy, and there’s not a dry eye in the house after he’s done )

Trini stands surrounded by her family, caught in the arms of her wife who’s chest rumbles with laughter against her back, and they are young and this was always going to happen eventually; it’s better that they figured it out early.

( this is what Zack says )

At the end of it all, the guests filter out. Jason’s hug lasts too long for Kimberly and it’s a surprise Trini lets him squeeze her that same way. Billy asks for permission first, but his arms are firm and gentle in equal parts. Zack looks ready to cry. He doesn’t, but he does follow his teammate’s lead, tugging all of them into a five-way hug that goes on for a touch too long.

“Congratulations, baby,” June says in the front yard, her hand gentle as it cups her daughter’s face.

Her brothers are shoving each other on their way to the van and Billy and his mom are waving on their way down the driveway. Jason honks his horn as he pulls out after them, and Zack hangs half-out the truck’s window to wave goodbye.

“I love you,” Trini says, and it’s not a whisper or an accident and she hugs her mother for a long moment after the phrase is returned.

When they’re gone, too, Kimberly slides up behind her, arms around Trini’s waist, and she presses a kiss to her hair. “You okay?” comes her question, quiet and nervous at the possible answers.

Trini leans back into her and closes her eyes. “More than,” she says and it’s the truest thing she’s ever known.

.

For all the things she’d imagined on her wedding night (more specifically, on _any_ wedding night because she doesn’t _think_ about things like weddings because she’s not _that kind of girl_ \-- which is a lie, of course, and not a good one) she never, once, imagined the act of brushing her teeth or getting dressed for bed.

But that’s what happens.

It’s late, the crickets loud in the hollow of the yard outside, mist forming from the cool air and the windows are open. They’ve yet to be closed. Only the lamp in the bedroom, by the bed, is on and Trini brushes her teeth in the dark of the bathroom with the door open and looks away from her scrubbed-clean face. Looks at the tiles instead, pressing her socked feet into them harder and harder until it’s time to spit the toothpaste back out.

Kimberly is in the kitchen somewhere. The sink had run for a moment and there’d been a clink of glass that had given her away, but they’ve both been quiet since they came in. Since they got undressed separately and Trini shoved her wedding clothes into her half-open suitcase in the corner by their bed.

She thinks this whole thing is probably a lot different for people who loved each other _before_ the proposal

( though she wonders at whether her and Kimberly _had_ and just hadn’t known, mostly because there’s plenty of things that have happened to her that took her a reasonable amount of time to get behind -- not the least of which was becoming a superhero in the first place )

where there’s time in the hotel room, on the honeymoon, or whatever normal newlyweds get into to go to sleep with your makeup on. She imagines a future with all sorts of time, where it’s _not_ running out, and Kimberly pressing her hard into the hotel room mattress, mouthing down Trini’s neck like she’d done just yesterday morning on the couch, fingers pressing into the button of her pants and that dress hiking up her hips, Trini’s fingers slipping higher and higher and --

“Ready for bed?”

Kimberly’s voice startles her and Trini realizes that she’s been standing in front of the sink with the water running for the past minute or so. She jerks forward, using one of the little paper cups by the sink to rinse out her mouth, and then turns the water off, shoving her yellow toothbrush back into the holder on the counter.

“Yeah,” she says, and when she turns, Kimberly is eyeing her strangely, as if concerned. Trini imagines she’s an odd sight, if only for the way her ears have turned bright red under scrutiny.

In the safe, dark swaddle of their bedroom,Trini lies in the bed she’s shared with Kimberly for the past week or so, hand twitching on the blanket top, itching to reach out and grab at the other girl’s. She stays still.

“Did you mean what you said?”

Kimberly asks it with the trailing lilt of remorse -- she’s already sorry to have said anything and Trini hasn’t even given her answer, yet.

The logical choice to kill a minute, to give herself some time to _think_ of what is proper and right to say at times like this, would be to return with, _Said what?_

As if she’s said a hundred things today that could use some clarification. The vows, of course, are the only thing that Kimberly could be referring to. Everything else had already been given to light already, but Trini’s vows before they’d been officially married were brand-new and shiny and quiet in the air they were sharing with their families. A sharp twist of guilt, of embarrassment for something she doesn’t necessarily _regret_ stabs through her stomach and twists, leaving her feeling half-empty and startled. She blinks up at the ceiling.

“Yeah,” she sighs, finally, honest and caught and terrified of what Kimberly might say. “I meant it.”

Kimberly is even more quiet. An impossibility, perhaps, because the air had been so stiff before this moment, before she’d broken it apart to ask a question for which she shouldn’t have even needed further answer. “Why now?”

There’s a good point there, of course, because so much time has past since this whole thing started. Weeks and weeks of classes and finals and tests and biology projects; of training and sparring and patrolling the streets some nights. They’ve been alone together for so long, and isn’t it in those moments -- during the scurrying passage of time -- when you find yourself caught in love with someone like Kimberly Hart? Trini certainly thinks that’s how it goes. For her, at least.

It’s possible that Kimberly is talking about just the days they’ve been doing this dance -- this short engagement. Why does something like this not come up closer to the proposal? Trini doesn’t really know.

She takes a breath, taps at her dry bottom lip with the tip of her tongue, and then sighs. “I don’t know,” she starts, because she doesn’t. Except, “I guess there are things you say when you’re not sure how much longer you have to say them.”

There’s a shift on the pillow beside her own. She turns towards it to find Kimberly staring at her in the darkness. There’s not a lot of light outside, save for the sparseness of the moon through the trees, but Kimberly’s eyes seem bright and curious. Most of all: they’re closer than they’ve been since yesterday, on the couch.

And certain things like sharing an apartment and brushing your teeth together and a courthouse marriage should make it so that you’re less nervous around someone, but Trini doesn’t have much proof for the theory of it.

Those things _should_ make it easier. But that doesn’t mean that they do.

“What?” she whispers, because even breathing -- or _moving_ enough to shift the sheets -- feels too loud for whatever is lingering between them.

Kimberly shakes her head, closes her eyes, and then she opens them back up. “I just...I know what you mean.”

“You do?”

“I’m the one that proposed, remember?”

And there were moments, perhaps, where Trini had wondered for whose sake Kimberly had done that for. She had expected it to turn out to be some basic pity move. ‘Marry your best friend when you’re all gonna die anyway’ and so on. She hadn’t expected that it was something Kimberly had hoped to have time for in the future.

“Oh.”

And, well, there’s nothing much for her to say besides that.

There’d been a touch of that feeling, perhaps, that night in her bedroom: because she’d seen the ring and she’d jumped at the opportunity (it took some time, of course, because she had to be _sure,_ so “jumped” isn’t the right word, and yet --). She had hoped that Kimberly hadn’t merely seen the list and proposed without a second thought because she’s going to _die_ soon, maybe, (they all are, maybe).

Kimberly deserves what she wants, and she so rarely gets it, but today had seen her happier than Trini thinks she’s been before.

“I love you,” Trini murmurs fervently because Kimberly is staring at her and what else is there to say? “I --”

Kimberly scoots closer and kisses her cheek. She says, “I love you, too,” but it’s not like any of this is _news_. Of course they love each other. They’ve loved each other all along, but maybe not always like this. Trini’s chest is aching. Kimberly holds her hand.

That feeling is deep in her chest, but it’s buried when Kimberly looks at her like that (it doesn’t mean _it’s not there)_ but they’re married now and Kimberly is her _wife_ and her mom had _hugged her_ had given them her _blessing_ and now they’re in their bed and in two or three  or ten days time they might be dead.

She’s crying. She knows that she is, even as she isn’t sure _why_ . This is supposed to be a good night, a happy one, and they’re married now, so she closes her eyes. She can’t see the moonlight hitting the side of Kimberly’s face through the window and _not_ cry right now.

Kimberly pulls Trini into her arms, tucking Trini’s face into her shoulder and saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” sounding breathless, shaking with same emotion that Trini is also being swept away by. “We’re going to be fine.”

Her lips fall to Trini’s forehead, pressing firmly there, and then she pulls away and Trini looks up, pulls away to do so, and their eyes meet in the darkness. And it’s not like they haven’t done this before now. This isn’t new, either, but it feels different somehow when Kimberly’s eyes drift close as she moves in and Trini’s do the same. It feels different when their lips meet -- sweeping and endless and balanced in a way that it hadn’t been before.

Trini parts her lips a little before initiating the second kiss and Kimberly sighs, kisses her back just as hard, hands sliding down Trini’s side, her left hand resting on Trini’s hip. The angle they’re at isn’t a good one -- it’s craning their necks to try and meet one another -- and Trini is tugging at Kimberly before she even makes plans to do so. She tugs Kimberly until she swivels, until Kimberly is on top of her, pressing her into the mattress, into the sheets below them, legs tangling together in the blankets.

It’s so quiet. The only sound is the breeze coming in through the window, shifting in the trees outside, and the rustle of Kimberly moving so that her arms are braced on either side of Trini’s shoulders, so she can reach her better. Her warm fingers slide underneath the hem of Trini’s baggy shirt, drifting higher and Trini takes a sharp breath in, teeth grazing against Kimberly’s bottom lip until -- finally -- they part, only to try and catch their breath from too close.

“Trini,” Kimberly starts quietly, her voice sounding strained. “We shouldn’t --” Her left arm is shaking from the effort of holding herself up, or maybe from something else, and her right hand doesn’t move any higher up Trini’s shirt as she says it. She opens her mouth, as if there’s more to say than just that, but Trini stops her with another kiss, with her parted lips and her tongue flicking slowly into Kimberly’s mouth.

It’s a nice sentiment, to tell her they should stop, as if Trini _could._ As if she hadn’t signed a marriage certificate just a few hours ago that had both of their names on it; as if there’s anyone else she _should_ be doing this with. The thought of doing this with anyone else makes the room feel like it’s been tilted on its axis and Trini absolutely _aches._

Kimberly must be able to feel her stiffen because she draws away, her eyes worried and dark as they rove endlessly over Trini’s face, looking for injury; for discomfort; for any sign that this isn’t what Trini wants. She tugs her hand out of Trini’s shirt immediately and digs her palm into the mattress instead, like she’s trying to lift herself enough that there isn’t any of her weight resting on Trini’s body anymore. The motion causes her to shift between Trini’s legs, where her knees are bent to press into Kimberly’s hips, and Trini bites her lip to keep from groaning at the shift in pressure.

“Are you --?” Kimberly starts, but Trini stops her. She turns her face, tilts her neck, to press a kiss into the soft skin of Kimberly’s upper arm, braced beside her.

“No, Kim, I --” But that sounds wrong. She hears it herself before she sees the look that passes over Kimberly’s face. So she brings her arms up from the safety of the mattress to settle on Kimberly’s spine, to bring her body resting back down on her own, palms lying flat on the dip of her lower back. “I...I want-- That is...if _you_ want --”

Relief, then, passing back over Kimberly’s face and into her eyes. She smiles, looking precise, nervous. “Are you sure?” she whispers. And her tone is new. It isn’t one that Trini thinks she’s ever heard from her before. It makes everything feel slanted; wrong. It sounds broken.

For the first time, it hits her that she might not have been the only one longing for this over the last year. It’s possible that Kimberly has been wanting this just as long and that tremble in her voice is the thought of never knowing it. Of having it, holding it, and having it taken away.

Braver now, Trini kisses her again and everything shifts back into place until it’s brighter. Better, somehow. “I’m sure,” she says, pulling away. Kimberly’s eyes are closed and she takes a sharp breath. Trini presses their foreheads together. “I’ve...I’ve never --” She starts, because she _hasn’t_ ,

( at her last school, there’d been a girl she’d kissed under the bleachers once or twice -- pretty, with a soft laugh, and they’d shared Algebra together -- and her hand had slipped a little high on Trini’s thigh, but it wasn’t _this_ and she’d moved a month later anyway )

but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to, doesn’t want _this._ “But...I really want to. With _you_.” She holds her breath for a moment, waiting. Kimberly’s eyes shine. “Is that okay?”

“More than okay,” Kimberly whispers, but her voice sounds sure now. Stronger. “Amazing.” She kisses Trini’s jaw, the high of her cheek, and then her lips again.

That feeling is still there in her chest -- complicated and unpleasant -- but it’s so hard to notice it when Kimberly is in between her legs like this and it feels like something in the low of her stomach is _burning_.

“Have you --?” she starts, but she knows the answer. Even if it wasn’t more than once, she knows.

A dark look crosses Kimberly’s face and Trini thinks it might be remorse. She brings up one of her hands to thumb away the furrow of her eyebrows.

“It’s okay,” she says quickly, and she presses her lips to Kimberly’s chin. “It’s not like --”

And she’s not sure _what_ it’s not like, so she just stops talking.

“Yeah, but --” Kimberly swallows, looks away, then back. “He...wasn’t you.” She brushes away the last of Trini’s tears with the pads of her fingers, rolling herself onto her elbow to manage the balance of it. “You’ll be my last.”

Trini’s breath catches in her throat and, for a moment, she’s not sure if it’s meant metaphorically or not -- isn’t that what wedding vows typically imply?

But it’s possible that “last” is meant in the mortal sense.

“That’s…” Trini breathes, closing her eyes for a moment, “...an _insane_ amount of pressure.”

Kimberly smiles -- like pushing wet hair from their eyes in the setting sun or looking across a bonfire and knowing you’re not alone -- and shrugs as best as she can manage from her position. “Think you can handle it?” she asks, lips trailing down Trini’s neck, one of her hands already tugging insistently at the waistband of her shorts.

Her fingers slips into her shorts, pressing into the dip of her hip bone, thumb slipping against the waistband of Trini’s panties. Trini groans, eyes closed, and is just about to say something about Kimberly being the death of her as Kimberly presses hard, biting kisses against the curve of Trini’s jaw, but Kimberly’s fingers slip under the fabric and she doesn’t get the chance

.

Graduating, Trini thinks, is strange.

The ceremony is long and there are people she doesn’t really know ( _graduates,_ perhaps) who offer their congratulations, girls from her English class who coo at her wedding band (“It’s so pretty,” one says, and Trini can’t tell them that, yes, it is, because it’s made from an alien spaceship, so she thanks them, moves on).

Kimberly is lined up nowhere near her, up towards the front close(ish) to Billy. Jason is closer. He’d squeezed her shoulder when her and Kimberly had arrived, and Billy had waved cheekily. Somewhere out on the football field, Zack is sitting with Kimberly’s parents -- they’d used their third ticket for him -- and she hasn’t seen him yet, but knowing he’s out there is enough.

The others are chattering nervously as they all line up in the gymnasium for the processional and Kimberly smiles before they begin. Trini watches the camera feed projected on the screen by the stage, swoop over her serene face as she makes her way down the center of the field about a minute before Trini will even get the chance.

Mr. Caplan gives a speech before they hand out diplomas. He does not look happy.

( This is an understatement. He’s never been the kind of man to enjoy his job, but this past year had seen an alien invasion that had destroyed the entire art wing. Not a big loss, perhaps in his eyes, but he is still the principal, the hard-featured, undisputed leader of these kids until he lets them loose, and so, yes, they will listen to him. He will make them. One last time. )

He says something about never giving up, never giving in, but having fun, too.

Kimberly turns partway through it and catches Trini’s eyes, rolls her own. Trini smiles, tries not to laugh, and, mostly, turns an embarrassing shade of red. She’s glad, for once, that Zack isn’t anywhere near where she’s sitting, that he can’t possibly see her reaction and guess at what it is that’s caused it.

What she is trying not to think about:

Kimberly in the early morning light, groaning as she turns off the alarm on her phone and tucking her arm under her pillow once she’s done, smiling sleepily at Trini on the other side of the bed.

“Sleep well?” she’d asked, voice pitched low and husky as her throat creaked out the first words of the day, the sheets sliding down to reveal the bare of her rib cage and Trini’s mouth had gone dry at the sight.

She’d wanted to say, _When we_ **_got_ ** _to sleep,_ or something equally cool and unaffected, but she hadn’t been able to manage it, mumbling a quiet and just as true, “Yeah,” instead. Then, “You?”

And the endlessly frustrating thing about Kimberly Hart has got to be the way she hadn’t gone with a verbal response. Perhaps, the most frustrating part about her is that she’d kissed Trini backwards into her pillow, the sheets moving down the rest of the way to rest in the dip of her bare back and Trini hadn’t been able to even send a warning about morning breath -- although, who has the right to care when Kimberly Hart is kissing you like that?

Billy’s name is called first. She claps so hard her hands sting and Jason yells something like, “Yeah, Billy!” from several rows behind her.

Then there’s Kimberly, smiling awkwardly and shaking hands with Mr. Caplan, then the superintendent and a couple other teachers up on the stage. Her eyes dart to Trini as she makes her way down the stairs, then somewhere to the side, to where her parents are seated, no doubt.

When it’s her turn, finally, she barely makes it up the steps from how suddenly her heart is beating against her ribcage, how fiercely her hands are shaking. Her brothers are hooting somewhere to the side, from their seats in the bleachers. It must be Zack who yells, “Trini, I love you!” because no one else would dare.

In one of the wooden, white chairs -- seven or so rows back -- Kimberly ( her _wife_ ) is clapping and grinning with her graduation cap askew, the big sleeves of her robe sliding down to her elbows, and Trini is surprised, later, that she hadn’t tripped -- that she hadn’t passed out for forgetting to breathe for a moment.

.

No one throws their hat, thank _God,_ but it’s a struggle to find their families in the mess of people once they’re dismissed.

Zack is the first to find them, throwing his arms around Billy first and then tugging the rest of them in, one-by-one. Maddy is crying from beside them. She hugs her daughter for too long, then her daughter-in-law, too. June takes too many pictures --

( _Pose with your brothers. No, Jason, get in this one, too. Zack,_ **_smile._ ** _Trini...don’t look so miserable! That’s perfect, Billy. Okay, one with just Kimberly and Trini._ )

\-- and Trini has a sneaking suspicion that, by the end of it, she ended up smiling in every single one.

.

At dinner, in the restaurant, someone says, “Party of fifteen,” because the Scott family is there and Billy’s mom is still holding her son under her arm too tightly, and the restaurant has to shove two long tables together to fit them all.

“I hear from Jason that congratulations are in order,” Jason’s mom says before entrees, but after appetizers. She’s smiling from beside her daughter and Jason is too busy fighting with Zack over the last mozzarella stick two seats away to be of any use.

“Um, yeah,” Trini manages, and Kimberly finds her hand under the table and _squeezes._ “Thank you.”

Beverly smiles at them a little distantly. She’s just about to wonder if it’s because maybe she, too, had wondered if her son and Kimberly were going to get together, but her eyes focus a second later and she’s saying, “You know, Sam and I were only a little older than the two of you when we got married.”

“You were?” Kimberly’s voice gives away her own curiosity.

Probably at being taken so seriously from someone, first time out the gate.

“We were.” As she says it, she turns to look at her husband, sitting on the other side of Pearl, right by Jason and leaning his elbows against the table to talk to Kimberly’s dad. “His mother was _livid._ ”

Trini laughs and Kimberly meets her eyes, smiling. “I know how that goes,” she says and Beverly is grinning now.

“But, you know, here we are, twenty years and two kids later and…” She trails off again, looking over at her husband, still, before glancing back over at them. “It’s lucky to find someone you can grow up beside.”

A moment later, she’s distracted by something Sam is saying to her over their daughter’s head, smiling and laughing and the two of their hands finding one another’s behind Pearl’s chair.

Kimberly shifts on her other side and, for all the things she’s found the time to imagine over the years, this was never how she pictured the day of her high school graduation -- crowding two tables with her three best friends, her _wife,_ and their families. Kimberly is still holding her hand under the table, her wrist resting on Trini’s thigh, and she feels soft skin thumb over her knuckles.

“You okay?” Kimberly asks, pressing the words into the side of Trini’s hair, warm breath parting it, tickling her, and Trini leans her head softly against her lips.

Her hands are shaking and she’s not sure why, but she knows that there’s no way Kimberly can’t feel it. “I’m just...” she manages after a moment, swallowing thickly, then, “...glad to be here with you, that’s all.”

More than that, though: they have, what? A week? A few days? Less? The crater in her chest is getting emptier each day.

Before she can say that, before she can cry, Kimberly is tilting her head and pressing her mouth against Trini’s and Trini thinks that’s a confirmation that she’s not the only one who feels it, but she says it anyway after she stops kissing her. “Me too,” she whispers and the world around them is full of laughter and their families talking, and Trini almost wants to cry, so she just kisses Kimberly again.

Then Kimberly pulls away, just a bit. Until there’s a respectable, family-friendly distance between the two of them that’s just enough to make Trini ache in the smallest of ways. “I’ll be gladder when I can get you alone again,” Kimberly says next, much too loud and she thinks that Beverly must have heard her, or _someone_ (her brothers, on her left, or her mother beyond them) but no one even looks their way and Kimberly bites her lip to keep from laughing at the look on her face.

It’s enough (for now) to make that feeling, that _lack_ , fall to the back of her mind.

..

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title from "Love You True" by Lydia Luce.


	7. there's nothing you and i won't do

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello again! apologies for the wait, but I thought it more symbolic to post this final chapter on the official anniversary of me posting my first ever Trimberly fic, [i was young, so i forgot](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10691523). hard to believe it’s been a year.
> 
> anyway, here is the conclusion (finally). hope you all enjoy!

It’s three days exactly.

Three days of waking up late in Kimberly’s arms after a night of Kimberly above her, below her, inside of her -- Kimberly breathing Trini’s name into the skin of Trini’s clavicle, her nails digging into Trini’s back and her thighs draped over Trini’s shoulders and--

It’s three shared showers and making Kimberly turn her to face the wall at times, if only to make her behave so actual showering gets accomplished. It’s breakfast in their couch, in their living room, sitting on the plush carpet with the windows thrown open and the day after graduation when Kimberly teases her, digging fingers into Trini’s ribcage to make her laugh, until she’s on top of her on the floor and when Kimberly’s mouth finds Trini’s neck, she says, “Bedroom?” between kisses until the answer is, “I want you _here_.”

It’s the next two days unable to _look_ at that part of the floor without blushing.

It’s couch hopping for two evenings, from Jason’s house to Billy’s, so they can all spend time with their families and ignoring how _strong_ that ache is when they’re all together. It’s movie marathons and Kimberly’s arm around her shoulders, pressing kisses to her neck in the relative darkness until Zack makes a loud gagging noise at the sight or the movie ends.

It’s three afternoons in the pit with Zordon less disappointed than usual -- quiet and accepting and not even bothering to berate Jason for not blocking a punch sent towards his face by Billy. It’s Alpha-5 following them around looking sadder than any prehistoric _android_ has the right to look and realizing that his beeps can actually sound _mournful._

It’s Jason saying, “We’ll be ready,” without believing it and Trini letting herself forget all those weeks or _months_ when she’d been so envious of him so that she can lean into his side, so he can wrap an arm around her and tuck her head under his chin.

It’s the night before it happens, when Zordon says, “Something is here,” before they leave and, “Rangers, be ready,” like they haven’t been trying. It’s the feeling becomng so _strong_ , so _empty_ that Trini has to fight herself to keep from clawing at her chest, to take it out, to make it _end._ It’s the look in Kimberly’s eyes and the wedding band on her finger and kissing her quietly, softly, with a touch of something that feels like acceptance for whatever it is that’s finally come.

It’s the five of them standing up on the edge of that cliff for so long that night that the sun sets around them. It’s none of them quite knowing how to leave one another to another night -- possibly the _last._

It’s Trini wanting to say something -- _thank you;_ or _I love you, all of you;_ or _I thought we’d have more time_ \-- but no part of her wants to make this any harder than it already is.

But then--

“See you guys tomorrow?” Billy says, always knowing what to _say_ , even in the darkness of a moment like this.

“Yeah, tomorrow,” Zack repeats.

“Tomorrow,” Jason agrees.

They stare at each other for a moment longer and then they part their ways. Trini’s hand slides from Zack’s to Billy’s to Jason’s, before coming to rest in Kimberly’s as they make their way back to her car.

It’s dinner with Trini’s family like it’s the last time they’ll have the chance -- her mom asking all sorts of _questions_ about decorating their tiny apartment and her brother’s fighting over dinner rolls and her dad just _smiling_ and Kimberly always answering so surely. It’s hugging her brothers (pressing kisses to their heads until they squirm away) and then her father (whispering, “I love you, Dad,” into his neck and trying not to _cry_ because he’ll ask questions if she does and she won’t have the answers) and finally her mother (“The two of you need to come to dinner more often than once a week, Trinidad,” June tells her, squeezing harder, and Trini _promises_ because she has no choice).

It’s a quiet drive home and one of Kimberly’s hands on the steering wheel, the other clasped between Trini’s and gently pressed between her knees.

It’s watching the evening news with Kimberly’s parents and Trini settling for just holding her hand because Kimberly is curled into her mother’s side -- her other hand reaching out to hold her father’s in his chair beside them.

Mostly, it’s whispering, “Thank you for marrying me,” when they’re wrapped together in their bed for possibly the last time and Kimberly looking like she’s about to cry, but not quite getting there. It’s letting Kimberly kiss her, fierce and endless like it’s their last night on earth, like they have all the time in the world, and sighing when her hands fumble down Trini’s body, shaking.

It’s knowing better than to bring it up.

.

It happens the next morning.

Something wakes them. Something _sharp_ and _clear_ and _insistent_ in Trini’s chest that has her sitting up so quickly in bed that the room spins. Kimberly wakes beside her and their eyes meet and that’s all they need to scurry out of bed, to get dressed -- in _what_ doesn’t matter; Trini’s armor is itching to spread up her ankles, over her fingers, up her wrists, before they’re even down the stairs -- and hurry out into the early June heat.

Kimberly leads them both, through the trees, and Trini tries her best to keep up.

The boys meet them in a clearing of trees by the mine -- they’d followed that feeling, too -- and, for a moment, they just stand there. The sky is lightening up above them and the trees are empty around them as the air thrums, vibrates, with something else, something she doesn’t recognize.

“What do you think it is?” Billy asks, and Trini imagines Rita, returned with her giant molten monster-man to have another go, to slash more scars across her neck, and push them into that fiery pit for good.

Kimberly’s armor clinks against her own as their hands come together. They’ve never held hands in their armor before and it’s a startlingly different than what she’s used to.

“I don’t know,” Jason confesses. None of them do, it seems, and the feeling is all around them. It’s hard to pinpoint it exactly.

Unlike last time, there are no rock monsters around to come at them full force, to leave mottled bruises despite the armor that will take weeks to heal even with superhero healing or strength or whatever it was that kept them alive after that initial train crash. There’s no thrumming under their feet, deep underground, like the very _Earth_ understands that there is some sort of trespasser on its surface. There’s _nothing_. A surprising amount of it, actually.

She closes her eyes, feels her breath even out in puffs against in the inside of her helmet and tries to look inward: to those burning threads of _something_ that’s done nothing but bring them together since that first fight, all those months ago. That stress and anger and all the emotions of believing there was no hope hadn’t ever been able to burn away.

And, for all that time spent wondering, it’s funny how she realizes it in an instant.

Like another voice speaking from the surface of some lake she’s submerged in. The words are garbled, but the message is clear:

_We’re not going to die._

So plainly, so clearly, that it seems like more of a feeling than a thought.

If you asked her where it came from, she wouldn’t be able to tell you.

That aching feeling has left her raw for so long that she’s nearly forgotten what it was like to live _without it_.

But it’s not something monstrous. Not at all. And she knows why it felt like it did before.

There’s no time to explain. No time because she wants, more than anything, to prove herself right. She turns to Kimberly, grabbing her hand tighter, and says, “I love you, you know,” because she needs to remind Kimberly right now. She needs to tell her again because she might be right (she might be _right_ ), but she might be _wrong_ (she’s not _wrong_ ).

Kimberly’s visor slips up, revealing her face, her confused frown. “Trini, what --?” she starts to say, but Trini shakes her head and cuts her off.

“I’ll lead the way,” she says. Her armor slips away, revealing the same clothes she’d worn yesterday -- the ones that Kimberly had removed with trembling hands the night before -- and she kisses her wife out of nothing other than sheer, unadulterated relief.

And then she’s running _fast_ through the woods.

.

It’s five minutes of running, _at least._ Even at the speed she’s going.

She pulls to a halt at the edge of the road when she sees her --

There’s a girl sitting on the ground, her arm twisted into an unnatural angle and she’s holding it close to her chest and she looks like she’s _crying_ but she doesn’t stop when she sees Trini.

Instead, her eyes turn up to look at her, watery and fearful and:

“I think I broke my arm,” gasped through sobs and Trini knows her.

Of course, she knows her. New kids notice one another, even when the only thing they have in common is two or three Saturday detentions back in November.

“Tommy, right?” she asks and she moves closer, drops her knees to the harsh gravel. There’s something burning in the pocket of Tommy’s unzipped jacket. It’s calling to her, but Trini ignores it, tries to look worried (she _is_ worried). “What happened?”

She doesn’t call 911. She thinks there may be no point.

“I was jogging. I shouldn’t have-- So _stupid_. I twisted my ankle last night and I wasn’t going to, but I thought --” Tommy says, and her dark hair is starting to escape from her ponytail, curling in the heat around her eyes. “I tripped, I--”

She’s maybe two seconds away from begging for an ambulance, but then there are the others, calling for her --

“Trini? Trini!”

That’s Kimberly and her voice is close. She bursts onto the road from the trees and she’s still in her armor, but it starts to slip away the moment she sees Trini kneeling beside Tommy.

“Is-- Is that--?” Tommy is spluttering, her eyes wide at the sight, but then she curls in on herself and lets out a small whimpering sound of pain. Then, “It hurts so bad.”

Trini is looking at her and not at the others when they come stumbling onto the path behind Kimberly.

“You found a coin, didn’t you?” Trini asks, and she’s not thinking about how crazy she must sound, talking this way to someone she should be calling an ambulance for, and that’s why she doesn’t notice the weird look Tommy gives her -- that startled, confused panic. “It’s...like a weird gem or something. It’s green. You found it, didn’t you?”

“What?” Tommy asks, her blue eyes wide from pain and confusion -- some mixture of the two that makes logical sense to feel when you’re surrounded by a girl you barely know and four of the Power Rangers.

“When did you find it?”

Trini grapples for the pocket of her jacket and Tommy tries to squirm away as best as she can without moving her arm down on the gravel. There’s something in the right one and Trini slips her hand into it, pulling free the familiar weight of one of their coins -- this one green, instead of yellow.

Rita’s coin. Tommy’s now.

“What are you doing?” Tommy asks. She reaches out as though she’d like to take it back, but she can’t. Trini turns and looks at her friends, watches as the armor slips away from their faces so they can see properly.

“Hey, Billy,” she says, her voice calmer than it has been in _weeks._ “Is it possible that all we were feeling was the sixth Power Ranger coming into possession of this thing?”

Billy frowns, deep in thought, and the others are looking at him now, too.

Zack looks ready to scream.

“I mean, I guess so, yeah,” Billy says. “But...But we got our powers right after we found ours. We should have _known_ . It felt like Rita was back. Or something _worse._ And why now? Why did it get worse last night?”

He has a point, and Tommy’s arm is still broken.

Except--

Trini turns and holds the coin out to Tommy, who is staring between them all like they’ve lost their damn minds. Maybe they have.

“You said you hurt your ankle last night, right?”

Tommy nods.

“Take this,” she says, and Tommy stares at her for a long, hard moment. When Trini doesn’t drop the hand that’s offering it, when she doesn’t break eye contact, Tommy slowly releases her broken arm, keeping it pressed to her chest, and reaches out to take it from her.

She holds it in her hand and, immediately, a green glow begins to spread over her palm, illuminating the semi-darkness of the early morning.

“What the fuck--” Tommy starts, but she doesn’t finish.

She doesn’t get the chance.

Trini’s (correct) theory is this:

Their coins had been activated the moment their lives had been put in danger by that train smashing into Billy’s van. Without them, they’d have been dead (or seriously mangled) by the wreck. But they hadn’t been.

Because they’d been healed. The same way Tommy’s coin had _almost_ done last night, when she’d hurt her ankle. The way it wants to now _especially_ because her arm is broken.

Tommy’s anger melts away, only to be replaced by utter confusion as she watches the coin come to life in her hand for one reason: to _heal._

This is what they’d been feeling. This is what was coming all along. It had felt like Rita because it _was_ in some weird, slant way. Or, at least, the coin’s last owner _had_ been. There’d been an emptiness carved into their chests to make room for what’s right in front of them; Trini _swears_ she can feel something click into place, filling it in again, as the coin glows hot in Tommy’s hand.

None of them had been conscious when their own coins had healed them, but, watching Tommy’s arm snap back into normal shape with a sickening crack--

Well.

You can imagine.

.

By the time they’ve got Tommy on her feet again, all of their armor has been shed and the Power Rangers stand there in various states of undress.

“So,” Zack starts, drawling the syllable out, “you mean to tell me that there’s nothing to fight after all? This whole time we’ve been killing ourselves over someone stumbling on Rita’s coin in the middle of town and carrying it around?”

It sounds ridiculous when you say it like that. Trini remembers crying herself to sleep the night before, thinking of all the things she’d never get a chance to do. She’d been so certain they were going to die; she had been _before,_ too. Before Billy came back, when they’d been _four_ instead of _five_ for about two hours and now--

Now, they’re _six_.

“That seems about right,” Kimberly says finally and then Jason laughs -- this loud, free, relieved thing that Billy, then all of them, imitate.

Despite it all, they’re laughing and Kimberly is holding her hand and Tommy is staring between them all as if they’re crazy. She pushes herself to her feet -- tests the weight on her ankle carefully, prods at her arm and, when it doesn’t hurt, looks up at them all even more befuddled.

“Okay. What the fuck is going on?” she asks. “You mean to tell me that the Power Rangers are a bunch of teenagers?”

Trini turns to her, and the others do, too, silence falling between them all as they stare at their newest addition, caught. “Yeah,” she says. Then: “Welcome to the team.”

And they’re all laughing again, lighter than Trini thinks any of them have ever been before.

.

It’s an embuggerance to get Tommy to follow them to the mine -- even worse to get her to follow them off the edge of the cliff.

She stares at them like they’re nuts until they show her, one-by-one that it’s okay. Trini remains with her, watching Jason jump, then Zack, then Billy -- watching her wife salute them with a smile and then fall backwards, over the edge with shameless ease.

“Seems super unlikely that I’m not gonna die,” Tommy says and Trini smiles, but doesn’t say anything. “Okay.”

She lets out a deep sigh and then she jumps.

Trini is close behind and she wishes she’d had Tommy’s bravery back when all of this started for them -- her bright-eyed trust, even as she’s edging away from them like they might turn on her and kill her at any moment. But then, Kimberly might not have tugged her over the edge (something she’s long-since forgiven -- not that she’d ever let Kimberly know that) and then where would she be?

Probably in the same place, she thinks -- dripping wet through the grated floor of the main room of the ship, staring up at Zordon’s bubbling bewilderment. But decidedly less happy. Kimberly is holding her hand again, and her finger slides down to play with Trini’s wedding band.

They probably wouldn’t be married either.

Zordon doesn’t apologize for scaring them all shitless. Of course he doesn’t. He doesn’t say a word about the weeks of panic they’d spent running around worrying that they were going to be _killed_. Why would he?

And Trini is even more convinced that he’s the biggest jackass she’s ever met.

He says, “The energy of the morphing grid is inside of each of you. It’s possible what we sensed was it making room for your teammate.”

He says, “The Green Ranger before you fell from our folds and betrayed us all. It is your turn to right her wrongs.”

He says, “The Power Rangers were a legion of warriors, sworn to--”

“Yo, can we save the orientation for later?” Trini cuts in, and Zordon stops speaking immediately, looking as annoyed as a face-in-the-wall can at someone.

“Yeah, skip to the good parts,” Zack agrees, throwing a wink at Trini when she gives him an appreciative look.

“We get armor,” Billy tells Tommy, who smiles at his excitement on instinct, but looks more confused than ever.

“Basically, we’re superheroes, right?” Tommy asks and Jason has his arms crossed. He nods. “Sure, yeah, okay. That’s fine. I think I get the gist of it.”

“Wait till you hear about your sacred duty,” Alpha-5 beeps, looking excited at the prospect of another teenager to harass.

“Right, cause that’s the _fun_ part of being a superhero,” Kimberly says, rolling her eyes.

Tommy laughs and Trini feels feels different, not empty, filled with something perhaps -- the missing piece of them that they’ve felt coming for weeks, finally slotted into place.

Zordon booms something about needing to tell her the rules, needing to go over every inch of information regarding where she found the coin and so forth, but no one is listening to him, the boys are all chatting over him to Tommy, asking her questions, telling her stories and she’s looking less and less tense by the minute.

“You’re not like evil, right? Cause the last chick that had that coin was super evil and--”

“--every day at four. Or...well, we used to _before,_ but now that you’re here we need to get you on a schedule and get you training and--”

“--not like Iron Man, at all. It’s actually way cooler and totally bulletproof. Or, I assume it’s bulletproof. We haven’t actually tested that out, but that’s probably a relief to you that I don’t have an example of it being bulletproof. Unless it _isn’t_ \--”

“Wow,” Kimberly cuts in after a second, just as Zordon has realized that his attempts to get them to listen to him won’t work. Alpha-5 is hovering nearby, ready to intervene if he needs to -- nervous, perhaps, about there only five platforms and mumbling aloud about where Tommy will morph. “Can we just give her a sec to breathe? An hour ago she had a broken arm and now she’s on a superhero team with a bunch of kids she doesn’t know.”

There’s silence and Tommy looks at Kimberly gratefully. “I actually do know you guys. You’re all...I mean, I was in detention with you for a couple weeks. You’re the grade ahead of me, but...some of you have pretty big reputations.”

Kimberly looks embarrassed by this. Jason coughs into his fist.

“Except for you. I don’t know you,” she says to Zack and he looks hurt for a moment before remembering that he’s not often _at_ school at all.

He smirks and sidles a little closer to her. “Well, maybe we can change that,” he says, then, “Ow, shit, dude! Not cool!” when Trini rocks onto her tiptoes to slaps him on the back of the head.

“And you’re the girls that just got married, right? I heard about that. Right on.” She looks excited by this, but then Trini realizes--

There was no danger at all and now they’re married.

But Kimberly doesn’t seem at all bothered by the reminder. Instead, she stands up a little straighter and wraps an arm around Trini’s waist, pulling her into her side. “That’s us,” she says.

There’s more silence, the six of them just sizing each other up -- or, five of them sizing up Tommy; Tommy sizing _them_ up.

“Okay, well, I like her,” Kimberly says after a minute. “Shall we put it to a vote?”

 _A vote for what?_ Trini wants to ask, but no one else seems as concerned about it.

“All for Tommy being the newest Power Ranger?”

One-by-one the boys say, “Aye,” with their hands raised and Tommy smiles, perhaps just eager to be included in something so bizarrely incidental.

Trini shakes her head with a laugh and Kimberly turns to look at her. “Aye,” she says, returning her wife’s easy smile.

“So, it’s settled. We can fill you in on the sacred duty stuff later,” Kimberly says and Tommy seems grateful, even as she’s being led out of the main control room and into the winding, whirring hallways of the ship, back out into the darkness of the cavern outside.

The boys lead Tommy to the exit, and show her how to leave and Kimberly and Trini linger behind them.

“That was the last thing on your list, right?”

Trini is thinking of other things

( of weddings that maybe shouldn’t have happened and a mother she shouldn’t have ever said goodbye to because now they’re going to live )

so she almost doesn’t hear her. She has to say, “Huh?” but Kimberly takes it as a need for clarification and not as a sign that she hasn’t been heard at all.

“You said you wanted to vote on something. I may need to consult the list itself to make sure it was, but I’m pretty sure it was on there.”

_Oh._

She’d forgotten about that.

One of the last points there that hadn’t been crossed out.

“Yeah, it was,” she says.

Kimberly grins. “Well, now you can cross it off.”

She pulls her hand away, stepping forward and getting ready to jump up through the water so they can swim to the cliff after the others -- maybe take Tommy to the recently-rebuilt Krispy Kreme and give her the lowdown, but Trini stops her with a hand to her arm. Kimberly turns and the sun is up above the cliff, sending fractures of light down through the water at weird angles that hit the side of her face angelically. Trini fights the urge to play with her wedding band.

“So,” she starts, trying to swallow her fear at the question she’s about to ask, “what does this mean?” Kimberly frowns, looking confused, so she clarifies: “For us?”

“What does what mean?”

Trini sighs. “We’re married, Kim. And now we’re...And we’re still married.”

“Oh,” Kimberly says, her eyes lighting up in understanding. She pauses for a moment, just long enough that Trini is certain her heart is going to pound out of her chest. But then Kimberly is leaning down, pressing her lips to Trini’s in a firm, but quick kiss that’s just enough to make her heart pound for other reasons. “Like I said,” she says as she pulls away, while Trini is too busy trying to catch her breath to even open her eyes all the way, “as long as I live.”

And Kimberly winks before jumping up through the water.

It’s ridiculous, of course, to leave Trini standing there, soaking into the gravel and splashing her with more water on her way out.

But this is the Kimberly Hart that ran after a girl she didn’t know on the very first night they met (officially). This is the Kimberly Hart that chased that same girl up the side of a mountain the next afternoon and then pulled her off a cliff. This is the Kimberly Hart that, when faced with her own mortality, wanted nothing more than to help Trini with her own -- who scaled the side of Trini’s house at midnight to propose in her pajamas.

This is Kimberly Hart -- her _wife_ \-- and Trini loves her so much, she’s half-certain she’ll die from it.

.

Trini’s list (when she fixes it later that day, listening to Kimberly humming from the shower in the other room) looks like this:

 

  * ~~__Graduate high school__~~


  * ~~_Fix things with my mom_~~


  * ~~_Teach my brothers how to drive_~~


  * ~~_Vote_~~


  * ~~_Get married, I guess_~~


  * ~~_Buy my own place, if we’re doing cliches_~~


  * ~~_Be that annoying family on the block with all the crazy Christmas lights_~~


  * ~~_Learn to juggle (maybe)_~~


  * _Not fucking die until I’m eighty_



 

Down at the bottom, she scribbles a little note to herself

( _We’ll see_ )

and tucks it safely into the very back of her now-empty suitcase.

.

They don’t die.

Obviously.

They go to breakfast, instead -- now a group of six instead of five.

They ask the Krispy Kreme cashier for extra napkins to sit on so they don’t drip through the upholstery and they order more doughnuts than they can eat and pool their money together to buy it before crowding around two tables, young and reckless and alive.

There’s more to come, of course. Rita had said others would come and they will. But not today.

Today, they’re faced with nothing other than inducting their newest member -- getting to know her and trying to compromise the months they’ve all spent being just _them._ Because a new team member means certain things, means teaching her how to fight, how to morph, how to be a part of _this_ in the way they’d only had a week and a half to figure out.

It’s a change, but not a bad one.

But it’s not the end. Rather, it’s the start of something more.

Trini Ortiz-Kwan--

Or, actually--

Trini _Hart_ (once the paperwork goes through) sits on a stiff seat pulled up beside one of their tables in the new-and-improved Krispy Kreme downtown with her wife slouched on her lap, one hand curled behind Trini’s neck to keep her balance, and smiles. Billy sits beside her, grinning and laughing and Zack across from them both, two straws sticking out from under his upper lip like walrus tusks. Jason has a seat pulled up beside the table that he’s sitting on backwards and he catches her eyes, rolls his own. Tommy looks confused, but happy and Trini looks at all six of them and thinks

( here is something else that is mine )

it’s a beautiful morning.

She looks at the side of Kimberly’s face, smiling wide and toothy in the sunlight coming in through the window. Outside, the rest of the town is starting to wake up because the world is still here, intact, for another day at least. Trini thinks Kimberly has never looked beautiful than she does right then -- on a morning she hadn’t thought she’d live to see.

It’s probably the most chaotic the five (no, _six_ ) of them have ever been this early. The two workers behind the counter certainly look annoyed, as does the only other person there (sipping his coffee with eyes glued to his phone in the corner booth).

( The ache of the past few weeks feels so far away. )

( She’d thought she’d die from it but she’s done nothing but survive so far. )

“So, Tommy,” Billy says, looking over at her, “how do you feel about country music?”

The others laugh and Tommy seems caught off guard, but Trini doesn’t know how to save her. Doesn’t think she could if she tried.

Kimberly’s fingers thread through Trini’s still-damp hair and Trini presses a kiss into her shoulder through her t-shirt.

“Um...I don’t know?” Tommy tries and they’re laughing again, Trini joining them this time.

This is how it begins.

...

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title from "Melt With You" by Modern English.
> 
> alright, that’s us, team. thank you for joining me and a special thank you to every person who’s left kudos, commented, bookmarked, etc. not just this, but with everything i’ve written for this fandom. you’re all so amazing and it means so much to me that you took the time to share your thoughts.
> 
> that being said, this will be my final fic. not just for this fandom, but in general (unless something drastic happens, but, doubtful). it’s time for me to focus on my original work. but it’s been such an honor to write for and be a part of such a unique, caring, and genuine group of people. i’ve learned and grown so much over the past year and i have the people who took the time to read my work to thank for that.
> 
> a big, special thank you to all of the amazing friends i’ve made because of this fandom. if only i had known what i was walking into when i walked out of the movie theater where i first saw this incredible movie. you’re all amazing and talented and wonderful.
> 
> but, as the lovely L. Frank Baum said, “Everything has to come to an end sometime.” 
> 
> thank you, again. you can’t possibly know what all of you have meant to me.
> 
> all my love.

**Author's Note:**

> title from "Speak" by Wild Cub. 
> 
> come bug me on [tumblr](http://housewithoutwindows.tumblr.com/) if you want (i need friends, but i don't wanna sound desperate).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [this all belongs to you and everything i do](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14623056) by [hearden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hearden/pseuds/hearden)




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